1,840 research outputs found
Associative-commutative reduction orderings
Rewrite systems are sets of directed equations used to compute by repeatedly replacing subterms in a given expression by equal terms until a simplest form possible (a normal form) is obtained. If a rewrite system is terminating (i.e., allows no infinite sequence of rewrites), then every expression has a normal form. A variety of orderings, called reduction orderings, have been designed to prove termination of rewrite sytems, but most of them are not applicable to extended rewrite systems, where rewrites may take into account inherent properties of given functions such as associativity and commutativity. In this paper we show how an ordering represented as a schematic rewrite system---the lexicographic path ordering---can be systematically modified into an ordering compatible with associativity and commutativity
Effective termination techniques
An important property of term rewriting systems is termination: the guarantee that every rewrite sequence is finite. This thesis is concerned with orderings used for proving termination, in particular the Knuth-Bendix and polynomial orderings. First, two methods for generating termination orderings are enhanced. The Knuth-Bendix ordering algorithm incrementally generates numeric and symbolic constraints that are sufficient for the termination of the rewrite system being constructed. The KB ordering algorithm requires an efficient linear constraint solver that detects the nature of degeneracy in the solution space, and for this a revised method of complete description is presented that eliminates the space redundancy that crippled previous implementations. Polynomial orderings are more powerful than Knuth-Bendix orderings, but are usually much harder to generate. Rewrite systems consisting of only a handful of rules can overwhelm existing search techniques due to the combinatorial complexity. A genetic algorithm is applied with some success. Second, a subset of the family of polynomial orderings is analysed. The polynomial orderings on terms in two unary function symbols are fully resolved into simpler orderings. Thus it is shown that most of the complexity of polynomial orderings is redundant. The order type (logical invariant), either r or A (numeric invariant), and precedence is calculated for each polynomial ordering. The invariants correspond in a natural way to the parameters of the orderings, and so the tabulated results can be used to convert easily between polynomial orderings and more tangible orderings. The orderings of order type are two of the recursive path orderings. All of the other polynomial orderings are of order type w or w2 and each can be expressed as a lexicographic combination of r (weight), A (matrix), and lexicographic (dictionary) orderings. The thesis concludes by showing how the analysis extends to arbitrary monadic terms, and discussing possible developments for the future
Higher-Order Termination: from Kruskal to Computability
Termination is a major question in both logic and computer science. In logic,
termination is at the heart of proof theory where it is usually called strong
normalization (of cut elimination). In computer science, termination has always
been an important issue for showing programs correct. In the early days of
logic, strong normalization was usually shown by assigning ordinals to
expressions in such a way that eliminating a cut would yield an expression with
a smaller ordinal. In the early days of verification, computer scientists used
similar ideas, interpreting the arguments of a program call by a natural
number, such as their size. Showing the size of the arguments to decrease for
each recursive call gives a termination proof of the program, which is however
rather weak since it can only yield quite small ordinals. In the sixties, Tait
invented a new method for showing cut elimination of natural deduction, based
on a predicate over the set of terms, such that the membership of an expression
to the predicate implied the strong normalization property for that expression.
The predicate being defined by induction on types, or even as a fixpoint, this
method could yield much larger ordinals. Later generalized by Girard under the
name of reducibility or computability candidates, it showed very effective in
proving the strong normalization property of typed lambda-calculi..
Acceptability with general orderings
We present a new approach to termination analysis of logic programs. The
essence of the approach is that we make use of general orderings (instead of
level mappings), like it is done in transformational approaches to logic
program termination analysis, but we apply these orderings directly to the
logic program and not to the term-rewrite system obtained through some
transformation. We define some variants of acceptability, based on general
orderings, and show how they are equivalent to LD-termination. We develop a
demand driven, constraint-based approach to verify these
acceptability-variants.
The advantage of the approach over standard acceptability is that in some
cases, where complex level mappings are needed, fairly simple orderings may be
easily generated. The advantage over transformational approaches is that it
avoids the transformation step all together.
{\bf Keywords:} termination analysis, acceptability, orderings.Comment: To appear in "Computational Logic: From Logic Programming into the
Future
Derivation Lengths Classification of G\"odel's T Extending Howard's Assignment
Let T be Goedel's system of primitive recursive functionals of finite type in
the lambda formulation. We define by constructive means using recursion on
nested multisets a multivalued function I from the set of terms of T into the
set of natural numbers such that if a term a reduces to a term b and if a
natural number I(a) is assigned to a then a natural number I(b) can be assigned
to b such that I(a) is greater than I(b). The construction of I is based on
Howard's 1970 ordinal assignment for T and Weiermann's 1996 treatment of T in
the combinatory logic version. As a corollary we obtain an optimal derivation
length classification for the lambda formulation of T and its fragments.
Compared with Weiermann's 1996 exposition this article yields solutions to
several non-trivial problems arising from dealing with lambda terms instead of
combinatory logic terms. It is expected that the methods developed here can be
applied to other higher order rewrite systems resulting in new powerful
termination orderings since T is a paradigm for such systems
Termination of rewrite relations on -terms based on Girard's notion of reducibility
In this paper, we show how to extend the notion of reducibility introduced by
Girard for proving the termination of -reduction in the polymorphic
-calculus, to prove the termination of various kinds of rewrite
relations on -terms, including rewriting modulo some equational theory
and rewriting with matching modulo , by using the notion of
computability closure. This provides a powerful termination criterion for
various higher-order rewriting frameworks, including Klop's Combinatory
Reductions Systems with simple types and Nipkow's Higher-order Rewrite Systems
(HO)RPO Revisited
The notion of computability closure has been introduced for proving the
termination of the combination of higher-order rewriting and beta-reduction. It
is also used for strengthening the higher-order recursive path ordering. In the
present paper, we study in more details the relations between the computability
closure and the (higher-order) recursive path ordering. We show that the
first-order recursive path ordering is equal to an ordering naturally defined
from the computability closure. In the higher-order case, we get an ordering
containing the higher-order recursive path ordering whose well-foundedness
relies on the correctness of the computability closure. This provides a simple
way to extend the higher-order recursive path ordering to richer type systems
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