







Proving Termination with (Boolean) Satisfaction Michael Codish The 17th International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2007); 2008

Abstract: At some point there was the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland (DPLL) algorithm~ite{DPLL62}. Forty five years later, research on Boolean satisfiability (SAT) is still ceaselessly generating even better SAT solvers capable of handling even larger SAT instances. Remarkably, the majority of these tools still bear the hallmark of the DPLL algorithm. % In sync with the availability of progressively stronger SAT solvers is an accumulating number of applications which demonstrate that real world problems can often be solved by encoding them into SAT. When successful, this circumvents the need to redevelop complex search algorithms from scratch. This presentation is about the application of Boolean SAT solvers to the problem of determining program termination. Proving termination is all about the search for suitable ranking functions. The key idea in this work is to encode the search for particular forms of ranking functions to Boolean statements which are satisfiable if and only if such ranking functions exist. In this way, proving termination can be performed using a state-of-the-art Boolean satisfaction solver. Available: bibtex entry pdf Related sites: slides from the talk Michael Codish

The Department of Computer Science

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

PoB 653, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel

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