NP-Completeness of a Combinator Optimization Problem

MS Joy, VJ Rayward-Smith - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 1995 - projecteuclid.org
MS Joy, VJ Rayward-Smith
Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 1995projecteuclid.org
We consider a deterministic rewrite system for combinatory logic over combinators $ S, K, I,
B, C, S', B'$, and $ C'$. Terms will be represented by graphs so that reduction of a duplicator
will cause the duplicated expression to be" shared" rather than copied. To each normalizing
term we assign a weighting which is the number of reduction steps necessary to reduce the
expression to normal form. A lambda-expression may be represented by several distinct
expressions in combinatory logic, and two combinatory logic expressions are considered …
We consider a deterministic rewrite system for combinatory logic over combinators , and . Terms will be represented by graphs so that reduction of a duplicator will cause the duplicated expression to be "shared" rather than copied. To each normalizing term we assign a weighting which is the number of reduction steps necessary to reduce the expression to normal form. A lambda-expression may be represented by several distinct expressions in combinatory logic, and two combinatory logic expressions are considered equivalent if they represent the same lambda-expression (up to --equivalence). The problem of minimizing the number of reduction steps over equivalent combinator expressions (i.e., the problem of finding the "fastest running" combinator representation for a specific lambda-expression) is proved to be NP-complete by reduction from the "Hitting Set" problem.
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