Termination Competition 2025
The Termination and Complexity Competition (termCOMP) 2025 will be affiliated with WST 2025.
The competition will be run on the RWTH Aachen High Performance Computing Cluster. The first run will be shortly before WST, 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 WST.
Contents
Dates
TBA
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 60 seconds. Further technical information will be made available here soon.
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
- Akihisa Yamada, AIST Tokyo Waterfront
Registration
To submit a tool, please follow the instruction at this repository.
To submit a benchmark, please follow the instruction at the TPDB ARI repository (for rewriting and integer transition systems) or the TPDB repository (for programming languages).
We recommend to register early, and update information as needed.
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.
Technical Details
Competition data will be presented via starexec-master (a successor of star-exec-presenter developed at HTWK Leipzig).
Technical details about the execution platform will be made available 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 2024
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.
Adopted changes:
- We will use the new ARI format for all Integer Transition System categories, see here for details.
Proposed changes:
- We plan to use CPF 3
- On the RWTH cluster, our computing time is limited. As it's difficult to predict how much testing will be needed on the new platform before the competition, I (Florian) would like to run the competition with a 60 instead of 300s timeout to avoid running out of credits. If things go well, we can switch back to a 300s timeout in 2026.
