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Proving Looping and Non-Looping Non-Termination by Finite Automata
A new technique is presented to prove non-termination of term rewriting. The
basic idea is to find a non-empty regular language of terms that is closed
under rewriting and does not contain normal forms. It is automated by
representing the language by a tree automaton with a fixed number of states,
and expressing the mentioned requirements in a SAT formula. Satisfiability of
this formula implies non-termination. Our approach succeeds for many examples
where all earlier techniques fail, for instance for the S-rule from combinatory
logic
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