The Pi-0-2-Completeness of most of the Properties of Rewriting You Care About (and Productivity)

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Most of the standard pleasant properties of term rewriting systems are undecidable; to wit: local confluence, confluence, normalization, termination, and completeness.
Mere undecidability is insufficient to rule out a number of possibly useful properties: For instance, if the set of normalizing term rewriting systems were recursively enumerable, there would be a program yielding “yes” in finite time if applied to any normalizing term rewriting system.
The contribution of this paper is to show (the uniform version of) each member of the list of properties above (as well as the property of being a productive specification of a stream) complete for the class $\Pi^0_2$. Thus, there is neither a program that can enumerate the set of rewriting systems enjoying any one of the properties, nor is there a program enumerating the set of systems that do not.
For normalization and termination we show both the ordinary version and the ground versions (where rules may contain variables, but only ground terms may be rewritten) $\Pi^0_2$-complete. For local confluence, confluence and completeness, we show the ground versions $\Pi^0_2$-complete.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationRewriting Techniques and Applications : 20th International Conference, RTA 2009
Number of pages15
Volume5595
PublisherSpringer
Publication date2009
Pages335-349
ISBN (Print)978-3-642-02347-7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2009
EventRewriting Techniques and Applications - Brasilia, Brazil
Duration: 29 Jun 20091 Jul 2009
Conference number: 20

Conference

ConferenceRewriting Techniques and Applications
Nummer20
LandBrazil
ByBrasilia
Periode29/06/200901/07/2009
SeriesLecture notes in computer science
Volume5595
ISSN0302-9743

ID: 16239368