Ramsey vs. lexicographic termination proving

  • Authors:
  • Byron Cook;Abigail See;Florian Zuleger

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research, UK, University College London, UK;University of Cambridge, UK;TU Wien, Austria

  • Venue:
  • TACAS'13 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Termination proving has traditionally been based on the search for (possibly lexicographic) ranking functions. In recent years, however, the discovery of termination proof techniques based on Ramsey's theorem have led to new automation strategies, e.g. size-change, or iterative reductions from termination to safety. In this paper we revisit the decision to use Ramsey-based termination arguments in the iterative approach. We describe a new iterative termination proving procedure that instead searches for lexicographic termination arguments. Using experimental evidence we show that this new method leads to dramatic speedups.