Termination Competition 2014

In 2014, the Termination Competition will be part of the FLoC Olympic Games.

Dates (tentative)

• call for tools, certifiers, problems: May 26
• registration of tools: June 15
• updates of registered tools, submission of problems: July 1
• competition runs: July 15 - 20
• results announced: July 21, during the Second FLoC Olympic Games Award Ceremony, Vienna.

Competition Categories and Awards

The competition contains several categories, grouped in three meta-categories:

• termination of term rewriting (all categories with HO/FO-TRSs, with- or without strategies)
• complexity analysis of term rewriting (all complexity categories)
• termination of programming languages (Logic Programming, Haskell, Java, C, ...)

In each meta-category, a medal will be awarded to the highest-scoring solver.

For every meta-category, we consider the sum of the scores for each category within that meta-category: The score of a tool is determined by the number of other tools which could be beaten in that category.

This puts the emphasis on categories with many competitors. (In particular, a category with just one entrant would produce a zero score.) A category is only run at the competition if there are at least 2 participants and at least 40 examples for this category in the underlying termination problem data base.

New Categories

This year a new category on termination of C programs will be included (see the details here).

Other categories for "transition systems" or "large scale (Java) programs" are under consideration depending on the number of interested participants and available problems.

Competition Procedure

All participants in the same category will be run on a subset of the existing problems of this category. The number of problems used in the competition is not fixed and will depend on the number of existing problems. The problem selection algorithm will be the same as in previous years (link http://www.termination-portal.org/wiki/Termination_Competition_Problem_Selection_Algorithm), however because of moving to StarExec, there might be modifications of the rules suggested by the organizer and decided by the SC.

The wall-clock timeout will be 60 (up to 300) seconds, and 4 cores will be available (if a tool wants to use concurrent execution).

For nearly all categories, the tools will be started in their directory and obtain two parameters:

• the problem file and
• the timeout in seconds.

The tools are expected to give an answer (YES, NO, MAYBE) in the first line on stdout, followed by a proof in ASCII, HTML, or CPF format. Exceptions to these rules are the certified (see also the CPF-website) and complexity categories. See all existing categories for more details.

For those problems where a correct answer is (partially) known, any contradictory answer will be penalized with a high negative score. Moreover, those buggy systems may have the opportunity to provide a corrected version that will be run again after the end of the live execution (displaying the new results afterwards, but out of competition).

For those categories devoted to prove only termination or non-termination, the score of a tool is the number of non-contradictory answers minus the given penalization (if any).

Committees

Steering Committee

• Jürgen Giesl, RWTH Aachen, Germany
• Frederic Mesnard, Université de la Réunion, France
• Albert Rubio (chair), UPC Barcelona, Spain
• Rene Thiemann, Universität Innsbruck, Austria
• Johannes Waldmann, HTWK Leipzig, Germany

Organizing Commmittee

• Johannes Waldmann, HTWK Leipzig, Germany
• Stefan von der Krone, HTWK Leipzig, Germany

Registration Info (tentative)

Participants must register on StarExecRegistration, indicating the competition categories where they plan to enter tools and problems, and then upload their contributions to StarExec.

Note: if I (J. Waldmann) don't know you ("knowing" is roughly symmetrical), then I will ask you to specify: what termination tool you're working on, what competition categories you plan to take part in, your affiliation (in case you're a student, also the name of your advisor/research group leader). The email address you give in the registration should be your institutional one.

We recommend to register early. After the deadline, access to StarExec might be restricted. We need time to prepare the competition, and other competitions may be running in parallel.

It is highly recommended that participants also subscribe to the termtools mailing list, because that is where announcements will be made, and where discussion takes place.

StarExec Wiki

Lots of useful information about StarExec is available here.

Technical Detail

We intend to run the competition on StarExec - a cross-community solver (tool) execution and benchmark (problem) library service under joint development (since 2012) at the University of Iowa and the University of Miami.

Technical details about the execution platform can be found here.

Contact

To contact the steering committee of the termination competition, send an email to terminationcompetitionsc<at>lists.rwth-aachen.de.

The competition organizers can be reached at johannes.waldmann<at>htwk-leipzig.de