How to Choose Weights in the Knuth Bendix Ordering

Knuth and Bendix proposed a very versatile technique for ordering terms, based upon assigning weights to operators and then to terms by adding up the weights of the operators they contain. Our purpose in this paper is twofold. First we give some examples to indicate the flexibility of the method. Then we give a simple and practical algorithm, based on the simplex algorithm, for determining whether or not a set of rules can be ordered by a Knuth Bendix ordering.

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