An Application of Ramsey's Theorem to Proving Programs Terminate (An Exposition)

We describe an application of Ramsey’s Theorem to proving programs terminate. This paper is self contained; it does not require knowledge of either field. Our account is based on two articles, one by B. Cook, Podelski, and Rybalchenko [5] and one by Podelski and Rybalchenko [19]. Many other papers that also used this application [3, 4, 18, 20, 21]. Termination checkers that have used this application are Terminator [2], Loopfrog [14], and ARMC [24] In the summary below we refer to Programs 1,2,3 and 4 which appear later in the paper.

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