Abstract
Size-change termination (SCT) is a general criterion to identify recursive function definitions that are guaranteed to terminate. It extends and subsumes the simpler criterion of lexicographic descent in function calls, which in classical recursion theory is known as multiple recursion. Neil Jones has conjectured that the class of functions computable by size-change terminating programs coincides with the multiply-recursive functions. This paper proves so.
Part of this research was done while the author was visiting DIKU, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, with support from DART, a project under the Danish Research Councils.
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References
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Ben-Amram, A.M. (2002). General Size-Change Termination and Lexicographic Descent. In: Mogensen, T.Æ., Schmidt, D.A., Sudborough, I.H. (eds) The Essence of Computation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2566. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36377-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36377-7_1
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