Termination Prediction for General Logic Programs

We present an approximation framework for attacking the undecidable termination prob-lem of logic programs, as an alternative to current termination/non-termination proof ap-proaches. We introduce an idea of termination prediction, which predicts termination of a logic program in case that neither a termination nor a non-termination proof is applicable. We es-tablish a necessary and sufficient characterization of infinite (generalized) SLDNF-derivations with arbitrary (concrete or moded) queries, and develop an algorithm that predicts termination of general logic programs with arbitrary non-floundering queries. We have implemented a ter-mination prediction tool and obtained quite satisfactory experimental results. Except for five programs which break the experiment time limit, our prediction is 100 % correct for all bench-mark programs of the Termination Competition 2007, of which eighteen programs cannot be proved by the existing state-of-the-art analyzers like AProVE07, NTI, Polytool and TALP