Abstract
We show that the associative-commutative matching problem is NP-complete; more precisely, the matching problem for terms in which some function symbols are uninterpreted and others are both associative and commutative, is NP-complete. It turns out that the similar problems of associative-matching and commutative-matching are also NP-complete. However, if every variable appears at most once in a term being matched, then the associative-commutative matching problem is shown to have an upper-bound of O (|s| * |t|3), where |s| and |t| are respectively the sizes of the pattern s and the subject t.
Partially supported by the National Science Foundation grant MCS-82-11621.
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Benanav, D., Kapur, D., Narendran, P. (1985). Complexity of matching problems. In: Jouannaud, JP. (eds) Rewriting Techniques and Applications. RTA 1985. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 202. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-15976-2_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-15976-2_22
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