1,919 research outputs found
The variable containment problem
The essentially free variables of a term in some -calculus, FV , form the set ( FV}. This set is significant once we consider equivalence classes of -terms rather than -terms themselves, as for instance in higher-order rewriting. An important problem for (generalised) higher-order rewrite systems is the variable containment problem: given two terms and , do we have for all substitutions and contexts [] that FV FV?
This property is important when we want to consider as a rewrite rule and keep -step rewriting decidable. Variable containment is in general not implied by FV FV. We give a decision procedure for the variable containment problem of the second-order fragment of . For full we show the equivalence of variable containment to an open problem in the theory of PCF; this equivalence also shows that the problem is decidable in the third-order case
What's Decidable About Sequences?
We present a first-order theory of sequences with integer elements,
Presburger arithmetic, and regular constraints, which can model significant
properties of data structures such as arrays and lists. We give a decision
procedure for the quantifier-free fragment, based on an encoding into the
first-order theory of concatenation; the procedure has PSPACE complexity. The
quantifier-free fragment of the theory of sequences can express properties such
as sortedness and injectivity, as well as Boolean combinations of periodic and
arithmetic facts relating the elements of the sequence and their positions
(e.g., "for all even i's, the element at position i has value i+3 or 2i"). The
resulting expressive power is orthogonal to that of the most expressive
decidable logics for arrays. Some examples demonstrate that the fragment is
also suitable to reason about sequence-manipulating programs within the
standard framework of axiomatic semantics.Comment: Fixed a few lapses in the Mergesort exampl
Model Checking Synchronized Products of Infinite Transition Systems
Formal verification using the model checking paradigm has to deal with two
aspects: The system models are structured, often as products of components, and
the specification logic has to be expressive enough to allow the formalization
of reachability properties. The present paper is a study on what can be
achieved for infinite transition systems under these premises. As models we
consider products of infinite transition systems with different synchronization
constraints. We introduce finitely synchronized transition systems, i.e.
product systems which contain only finitely many (parameterized) synchronized
transitions, and show that the decidability of FO(R), first-order logic
extended by reachability predicates, of the product system can be reduced to
the decidability of FO(R) of the components. This result is optimal in the
following sense: (1) If we allow semifinite synchronization, i.e. just in one
component infinitely many transitions are synchronized, the FO(R)-theory of the
product system is in general undecidable. (2) We cannot extend the expressive
power of the logic under consideration. Already a weak extension of first-order
logic with transitive closure, where we restrict the transitive closure
operators to arity one and nesting depth two, is undecidable for an
asynchronous (and hence finitely synchronized) product, namely for the infinite
grid.Comment: 18 page
Synthesis of sup-interpretations: a survey
In this paper, we survey the complexity of distinct methods that allow the
programmer to synthesize a sup-interpretation, a function providing an upper-
bound on the size of the output values computed by a program. It consists in a
static space analysis tool without consideration of the time consumption.
Although clearly related, sup-interpretation is independent from termination
since it only provides an upper bound on the terminating computations. First,
we study some undecidable properties of sup-interpretations from a theoretical
point of view. Next, we fix term rewriting systems as our computational model
and we show that a sup-interpretation can be obtained through the use of a
well-known termination technique, the polynomial interpretations. The drawback
is that such a method only applies to total functions (strongly normalizing
programs). To overcome this problem we also study sup-interpretations through
the notion of quasi-interpretation. Quasi-interpretations also suffer from a
drawback that lies in the subterm property. This property drastically restricts
the shape of the considered functions. Again we overcome this problem by
introducing a new notion of interpretations mainly based on the dependency
pairs method. We study the decidability and complexity of the
sup-interpretation synthesis problem for all these three tools over sets of
polynomials. Finally, we take benefit of some previous works on termination and
runtime complexity to infer sup-interpretations.Comment: (2012
Verifying Recursive Active Documents with Positive Data Tree Rewriting
This paper proposes a data tree-rewriting framework for modeling evolving
documents. The framework is close to Guarded Active XML, a platform used for
handling XML repositories evolving through web services. We focus on automatic
verification of properties of evolving documents that can contain data from an
infinite domain. We establish the boundaries of decidability, and show that
verification of a {\em positive} fragment that can handle recursive service
calls is decidable. We also consider bounded model-checking in our data
tree-rewriting framework and show that it is \nexptime-complete
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