Faster Basic Syntactic Mutation with sorts for some separable equational theories

Abstract

Sorting information arises naturally in E-unification problems. This information is used to rule out invalid solutions. We show how to use sorting information to make E-unification procedures more efficient. We illustrate our ideas using Basic Syntactic Mutation. We give classes of problems where E-unification becomes polynomial. We show how E-unification can be separated into a polynomial part and a more complicated part using a specialized algorithm. Our approach is motivated by a real problem arising from Cryptographic Protocol Verification. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.