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Publications and source records attributed to René Thiemann.
Automatic deduction tools such as automatic theorem provers, SAT (satisfiability) solvers, SMT (satisfiability modulo theories) solvers, and termination analyzers can be connected to proof assistants using various approaches, notably by certification and verification. This chapter reviews and compares the approaches available, and mentions several successful applications.
The Weighted Path Order of Yamada is a powerful technique for proving termination. It is also supported by CeTA, a certifier for checking untrusted termination proofs. To be more precise, CeTA contains a verified function that computes for two terms whether one of them is larger than the other for a given WPO, i.e., where all parameters of the WPO have been fixed. The problem of this verified function is its exponential runtime in the worst case. Therefore, in this work we develop a polynomial time implementation of WPO that is based on memoization. It also improves upon an earlier verified implementation of the Recursive Path Order: the RPO-implementation uses full terms as keys for the memory, a design which simplified the soundness proofs, but has some runtime overhead. In this work, keys are just numbers, so that the lookup in the memory is faster. Although trivial on paper, this change introduces some challenges for the verification task.
Recently it was shown that it is undecidable whether a term rewrite system can be proved terminating by a polynomial interpretation in the natural numbers. In this paper we show that this is also the case when restricting the interpretations to linear polynomials, as is often done in tools, and when only considering single-rule rewrite systems. What is more, the new undecidability proof is simpler than the previous one. We further show that polynomial termination over the rationals/reals is undecidable.
CeTA was originally developed as a tool for certifying termination proofs which have to be provided as certificates in the CPF-format. Its soundness is proven as part of IsaFoR, the Isabelle Formalization of Rewriting. By now, CeTA can also be used for certifying confluence and non-confluence proofs. In this system description, we give a short overview on what kind of proofs are supported, and what information has to be given in the certificates. As we will see, only a small amount of information is required and so we hope that CSI will not stay the only confluence tool which can produce certificates.
We provide an overview of CPF, the certification problem format, and explain some design decisions. Whereas CPF was originally invented to combine three different formats for termination proofs into a single one, in the meanwhile proofs for several other properties of term rewrite systems are also expressible: like confluence, complexity, and completion. As a consequence, the format is already supported by several tools and certifiers. Its acceptance is also demonstrated in international competitions: the certified tracks of both the termination and the confluence competition utilized CPF as exchange format between automated tools and trusted certifiers.
Since the first termination competition in 2004 it is of great interest, whether a proof that has been automatically generated by a termination tool, is indeed correct. The increasing number of termination proving techniques as well as the increasing complexity of generated proofs (e.g., combinations of several techniques, exhaustive labelings, tree automata, etc.), make certifying (i.e., checking the correctness of) such proofs more and more tedious for humans. Hence the interest in automated certification of termination proofs. This led to the general approach of using proof assistants (like Coq and Isabelle) for certification. We present the latest developments for IsaFoR/CeTA (version 1.03) which is the certifier CeTA, based on the Isabelle/HOL formalization of rewriting IsaFoR.
There are termination proofs that are produced by termination tools for which certifiers are not powerful enough. However, a similar situation also occurs in the other direction. We have formalized termination techniques in a more general setting as they have been introduced. Hence, we can certify proofs using techniques that no termination tool supports so far. In this paper we shortly present two of these formalizations: Polynomial orders with negative constants and Arctic termination.
In this paper we generalize the DP framework to a relative DP framework, where a so called split is possible.
When we want to answer/certify whether a given equation is entailed by an equational system we face the following problems: (1) It is hard to find a conversion (but easy to certify a given one). (2) Under the assumption that Knuth-Bendix completion is successful, it is easy to decide the existence of a conversion but hard to certify this decision. In this paper we introduce recording completion, which overcomes both problems.
We report on our formalization of matrix-interpretation in Isabelle/HOL. Matrices are required to certify termination proofs and we wish to utilize them for complexity proofs, too. For the latter aim, only basic methods have already been integrated, and we discuss some upcoming problems which arise when formalizing more complicated results on matrix-interpretations, which are based on Cayley-Hamilton's theorem or joint-spectral radius theory.
While there are many approaches for automatically proving termination of term rewrite systems, up to now there exist only few techniques to disprove their termination automatically. Almost all of these techniques try to find loops, where the existence of a loop implies non-termination of the rewrite system. However, most programming languages use specific evaluation strategies, whereas loop detection techniques usually do not take strategies into account. So even if a rewrite system has a loop, it may still be terminating under certain strategies. Therefore, our goal is to develop decision procedures which can determine whether a given loop is also a loop under the respective evaluation strategy. In earlier work, such procedures were presented for the strategies of innermost, outermost, and context-sensitive evaluation. In the current paper, we build upon this work and develop such decision procedures for important strategies like leftmost-innermost, leftmost-outermost, (max-)parallel-innermost, (max-)parallel-outermost, and forbidden patterns (which generalize innermost, outermost, and context-sensitive strategies). In this way, we obtain the first approach to disprove termination under these strategies automatically.
Termination is an important and well-studied property for logic programs. However, almost all approaches for automated termination analysis focus on definite logic programs, whereas real-world Prolog programs typically use the cut operator. We introduce a novel pre-processing method which automatically transforms Prolog programs into logic programs without cuts, where termination of the cut-free program implies termination of the original program. Hence after this pre-processing, any technique for proving termination of definite logic programs can be applied. We implemented this pre-processing in our termination prover AProVE and evaluated it successfully with extensive experiments.
This paper introduces a propositional encoding for lexicographic path orders in connection with dependency pairs. This facilitates the application of SAT solvers for termination analysis of term rewrite systems based on the dependency pair method. We address two main inter-related issues and encode them as satisfiability problems of propositional formulas that can be efficiently handled by SAT solving: (1) the combined search for a lexicographic path order together with an \emph{argument filtering} to orient a set of inequalities; and (2) how the choice of the argument filtering influences the set of inequalities that have to be oriented. We have implemented our contributions in the termination prover AProVE. Extensive experiments show that by our encoding and the application of SAT solvers one obtains speedups in orders of magnitude as well as increased termination proving power.