On Probabilistic Term Rewriting

Martin Avanzini (1) , Ugo Dal Lago (1, 2) , Akihisa Yamada (3)

1 FOCUS - Foundations of Component-based Ubiquitous Systems
2 UNIBO - Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna = University of Bologna
3 NII - National Institute of Informatics

We study the termination problem for probabilistic term rewrite systems. We prove that the interpretation method is sound and complete for a strengthening of positive almost sure termination, when abstract reduction systems and term rewrite systems are considered. Two instances of the interpretation method-polynomial and matrix interpretations-are analyzed and shown to capture interesting and non-trivial examples when automated. We capture probabilistic computation in a novel way by means of multidistribution reduction sequences, thus accounting for both the nondeterminism in the choice of the redex and the probabilism intrinsic in firing each rule.

Domaines: Logique en informatique [cs.LO]; Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

Martin Avanzini, Ugo Dal Lago, Akihisa Yamada. On Probabilistic Term Rewriting. Functional and Logic Programming - 14th International Symposium, Proceedings, May 2018, Nagoya, Japan. ⟨hal-01926502⟩