Tim@CIS.UPENN.EDU (Tim Finin) (11/21/86)
CIS COLLOQUIUM University of Pennsylvania 3pm November 15, 1986 216 Moore School COMPUTATIONAL PROBLEMS IN EQUATIONAL THEOREM PROVING Dr. Paliath Narendran General Electric Research Laboratory The area of Equational Reasoning has recently gained a lot of attention and has been found to have applications in such diverse areas as program synthesis and data base queries. Most of these applications are centered around using the equations as "rewrite rules" and, in particular, using the Knuth-Bendix completion procedure to generate a "complete" set of such rewrite rules. The power of the completion procedure lies in the fact that once a complete set of rewrite rules is obtained, we also have a decision procedure for the equational theory. We discuss some of the main computational problems involved in this area such as unification, matching and sufficient-completeness testing and outline the decidability and complexity results.