Termination Competition 2024

The Termination and Complexity Competition (termCOMP) 2024 will be affiliated with IJCAR 2024.

The competition will be run on the StarExec platform. The first run will be shortly before IJCAR, followed by a bug/conflict reporting phase and allowance for bug fixes. The final run and a presentation of the final results will be live at IJCAR.

Dates

• June 12: Tool and Benchmark Submission
• June 19: First Run
• June 26: Bugfix Deadline
• July 3-6: Final Run at IJCAR

Competition Categories

The competition contains several categories for termination and complexity from the areas of term rewriting (all categories with HO/FO-TRSs, with- or without strategies) and programming languages (Logic Programming, Haskell, Java, C, integer transition systems, ...)

Proposals for new categories are welcome.

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.

Competition Procedure

All participants in the same category will be run on the existing problems of this category. There might be modifications of the rules suggested by the organizer and decided by the SC.

The wall-clock timeout will be 300 seconds, and 4 cores will be available (if a tool wants to use concurrent execution). The tools will be started in their directory, and the problem file name is given as the command line argument. Extra info can be obtained from environment variables, cf. Termination Competition 2014 technical details

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 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).

A proof or answer that is known to be wrong will be penalized by -10 points, if it remains after the bugfix deadline. The SC will decide what should be penalized, depending on the discussion among the participants.

Steering Committee

• Florian Frohn (Chair and Organizer), RWTH Aachen
• Jürgen Giesl, RWTH Aachen
• Georg Moser, University of Innsbruck
• Étienne Payet, Université de La Réunion
• Albert Rubio, Complutense University of Madrid
• Akihisa Yamada, AIST Tokyo Waterfront

Registration

To submit a tool, please follow the instruction at the TermCOMP web repository.

To submit a benchmark, please follow the instruction at TPDB repository.

We recommend to register early, and update information as needed. 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 Information

This refers to StarExec in general, and not to Termination or Complexity in particular.

• user guide
• issue tracker
• announcements and discussion (combined feed for recent messages)
• (obsolete) announcements and discussion (discontinued, but contains some information that is still valid and not available elsewhere)

Technical Details

The competition will be running 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.

Competition data will be presented via starexec-master (a successor of star-exec-presenter developed at HTWK Leipzig).

Technical details about the execution platform (as of 2014) can be found here.

Contact

Any questions or suggestions regarding the termination competition should go to, and discussed at termtools<at>lists.rwth-aachen.de

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

Changes with respect to 2023

These lists reflect the discussion in the community, and in the steering committee. Items are preliminary, and not officially binding. Please do not edit this list (unless you're in the SC). Instead, send proposals to termtools or terminationcompetitionsc mailing list, or create a new wiki page and put a link here.

Proposed changes:

• we plan to introduce new categories for termination of probabilistic TRSs
• we plan to use the new ARI format

Adopted changes:

• To keep the tension high, the first run will not be public. Tool authors will be notified about technical problems and conflicting results.