Related papers: A Devil's Advocate against Termination of Direct R…

This paper is concerned with rule-based programs that go wrong. The unwanted behavior of rule applications is non-termination or failure of a computation. We propose a static program analysis of the non-termination problem for recursion in…

This paper is about computability. I claim the likely existence of a program DoesHalt(Program, Input) such that DoesHalt( HaltsOnItself, AntiSelf ) halts with resounding 'NO'. HaltsOnItself( Program ) is simply DoesHalt( Program, Program ).…

Programs increasingly rely on randomization in applications such as cryptography and machine learning. Analyzing randomized programs has been a fruitful research direction, but there is a gap when programs also exploit nondeterminism (for…

Extending our own and others' earlier approaches to reasoning about termination of probabilistic programs, we propose and prove a new rule for termination with probability one, also known as "almost-certain termination". The rule uses both…

Deciding termination is a fundamental problem in the analysis of probabilistic imperative programs. We consider the qualitative and quantitative probabilistic termination problems for an imperative programming model with discrete…

We present a set of rules for compiling a Dalvik bytecode program into a logic program with array constraints. Non-termination of the resulting program entails that of the original one, hence the techniques we have presented before for…

We study the termination problem for nondeterministic recursive probabilistic programs. First, we show that a ranking-supermartingales-based approach is both sound and complete for bounded terminiation (i.e., bounded expected termination…

This paper discusses limitations of reflexive and diagonal arguments as methods of proof of limitative theorems (e.g. G\"odel's theorem on Entscheidungsproblem, Turing's halting problem or Chaitin-G\"odel's theorem). The fact, that a formal…

We consider the termination/non-termination property of a class of loops. Such loops are commonly used abstractions of real program pieces. Second-order logic is a convenient language to express non-termination. Of course, such property is…

Termination of logic programs with negated body atoms (here called general logic programs) is an important topic. One reason is that many computational mechanisms used to process negated atoms, like Clark's negation as failure and Chan's…

The objective of this paper is to present general, mechanically verified, refinement rules for reasoning about recursive programs and while loops in the context of concurrency. Unlike many approaches to concurrency, we do not assume that…

We present a heuristic framework for attacking the undecidable termination problem of logic programs, as an alternative to current termination/non-termination proof approaches. We introduce an idea of termination prediction, which predicts…

The work reported here introduces Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP), a formalism that combines results of Logic Programming and Defeasible Argumentation. DeLP provides the possibility of representing information in the form of weak rules…

An important question for a probabilistic program is whether the probability mass of all its diverging runs is zero, that is that it terminates "almost surely". Proving that can be hard, and this paper presents a new method for doing so; it…

Proving program termination is typically done by finding a well-founded ranking function for the program states. Existing termination provers typically find ranking functions using either linear algebra or templates. As such they are often…

We present a new kind of nontermination argument, called geometric nontermination argument. The geometric nontermination argument is a finite representation of an infinite execution that has the form of a sum of several geometric series.…

How to extract negative information from programs is an important issue in logic programming. Here we address the problem for functional logic programs, from a proof-theoretic perspective. The starting point of our work is CRWL (Constructor…

Many programs allow the user to input data several times during its execution. If the program runs forever the user may input data infinitely often. A program terminates if it terminates no matter what the user does. We discuss various ways…

In recent years, numerous techniques were developed to automatically prove termination of different kinds of probabilistic programs. However, there are only few automated methods to disprove their termination. In this paper, we present the…

Dickson's Lemma is a simple yet powerful tool widely used in termination proofs, especially when dealing with counters or related data structures. However, most computer scientists do not know how to derive complexity upper bounds from such…