464 research outputs found
Ten Conferences WORDS: Open Problems and Conjectures
In connection to the development of the field of Combinatorics on Words, we
present a list of open problems and conjectures that were stated during the ten
last meetings WORDS. We wish to continually update the present document by
adding informations concerning advances in problems solving
Deciding Equations in the Time Warp Algebra
Join-preserving maps on the discrete time scale , referred to as
time warps, have been proposed as graded modalities that can be used to
quantify the growth of information in the course of program execution. The set
of time warps forms a simple distributive involutive residuated lattice --
called the time warp algebra -- that is equipped with residual operations
relevant to potential applications. In this paper, we show that although the
time warp algebra generates a variety that lacks the finite model property, it
nevertheless has a decidable equational theory. We also describe an
implementation of a procedure for deciding equations in this algebra, written
in the OCaml programming language, that makes use of the Z3 theorem prover
Deciding Conditional Termination
We address the problem of conditional termination, which is that of defining
the set of initial configurations from which a given program always terminates.
First we define the dual set, of initial configurations from which a
non-terminating execution exists, as the greatest fixpoint of the function that
maps a set of states into its pre-image with respect to the transition
relation. This definition allows to compute the weakest non-termination
precondition if at least one of the following holds: (i) the transition
relation is deterministic, (ii) the descending Kleene sequence
overapproximating the greatest fixpoint converges in finitely many steps, or
(iii) the transition relation is well founded. We show that this is the case
for two classes of relations, namely octagonal and finite monoid affine
relations. Moreover, since the closed forms of these relations can be defined
in Presburger arithmetic, we obtain the decidability of the termination problem
for such loops.Comment: 61 pages, 6 figures, 2 table
On All Things Star-Free
We investigate the star-free closure, which associates to a class of languages its closure under Boolean operations and marked concatenation. We prove that the star-free closure of any finite class and of any class of groups languages with decidable separation (plus mild additional properties) has decidable separation. We actually show decidability of a stronger property, called covering. This generalizes many results on the subject in a unified framework. A key ingredient is that star-free closure coincides with another closure operator where Kleene stars are also allowed in restricted contexts
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