Termination Competition 2015

In 2015, the Termination Competition (Call for Participation) will be affiliated with CADE-25.

News

Wed Aug 5 07:12:56 CEST 2015 :

Final list of participants

We are having serious difficulties starting live-size competition jobs.

We will try to start anyway, at 10:30 CEST today, but results may trickle in rather slowly, and the combined results presentation may not work initially. That's why here's a list of jobs for individual categories (to be extended as we move forward)

• TRS Standard, TRS Standard certified
• cycle termination

Dates

• registration of tools: July 1
• submission of problems: July 7
• updates of registered tools: July 29 (extended deadline)
• competition runs: August 5 and 6 (during CADE)

Competition Categories and Awards

The competition contains several categories from the areas of

• 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, ...)

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 Termination_Competition_Problem_Selection_Algorithm 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).

The tools will be started in their directory and obtain

• the problem file name on the command line,
• and extra info 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 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

Registration

Participants must register

• on Starexec (so you can upload and test your solver): enter your data at StarExecRegistration, indicating the competition categories where they plan to enter tools and problems, and then upload their contributions to StarExec

• *and* with the Termination Competition Organizer (so I known what solver/configuration to use). Details will be announced here: Termination Competition 2015 Registration

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

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 star-exec-presenter - developed and running at HTWK Leipzig.

Technical details about the execution platform (as of 2014) 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

Send new problems for the competition to rene.thiemann<at>uibk.ac.at

Changes with respect to 2014

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:

• The answering scheme and the scoring of the complexity category slightly changed. The new version of the grammar and the updated scoring mechanism are described in more detail on the complexity related page, and below is just a small summary of the changes.
  • The grammar for answers was simplified and is now less ambiguous.
  • The grammar for answers now explicitly contains lower bounds.
  • Lower bounds will be counted for complexity.

Adopted changes:

• The CPF version has been updated from version 2.2 to version 2.3. This transition consists of purely incremental changes. The details of the changes are documented in the CPF repository log.

• In addition to the category for "full" C programs, we also intend to have a category for "C integer" programs. These are essentially integer transition systems formulated as imperative programs in C syntax. A detailed definition can be found here.

TODO

See Termination Competition 2015 TODO