Abstract
Higman’s lemma, a specific instance of Kruskal’s theorem, is an interesting result from the area of combinatorics, which has often been used as a test case for theorem provers. We present a constructive proof of Higman’s lemma in the theorem prover Isabelle, based on a paper proof by Coquand and Fridlender. Making use of Isabelle’s newly-introduced infrastructure for program extraction, we show how a program can automatically be extracted from this proof, and analyze its computational behaviour.
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Berghofer, S. (2004). A Constructive Proof of Higman’s Lemma in Isabelle. In: Berardi, S., Coppo, M., Damiani, F. (eds) Types for Proofs and Programs. TYPES 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3085. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24849-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24849-1_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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