Abstract
Higman’s lemma has a very elegant, non-constructive proof due to Nash-Williams [NW63] using the so-called minimal-bad-sequence argument. The objective of the present paper is to give a proof that uses the same combinatorial idea, but is constructive. For a two letter alphabet this was done by Coquand and Fridlender [CF94]. Here we present a proof in a theory of inductive definitions that works for arbitrary decidable well quasiorders.
Research supported by the DFG Graduiertenkolleg “Logik in der Informatik”.
Research supported by the British EPSRC.
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Seisenberger, M. (2002). An Inductive Version of Nash-Williams’ Minimal-Bad-Sequence Argument for Higman’s Lemma. In: Callaghan, P., Luo, Z., McKinna, J., Pollack, R., Pollack, R. (eds) Types for Proofs and Programs. TYPES 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2277. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45842-5_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45842-5_15
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