Abstract
The execution of a Prolog program can be viewed as a sequence of unifications and backtracks over unifications. We study the time requirement of executing a sequence of such operations (the unify-deunify problem). It is shown that the well-known set union problem is reducible to this problem. As the set union problem requires nonlinear time on large class of algorithms, the same holds for the unify-deunify problem. Thus the linearity of single unifications does not give a complete picture of the time complexity of Prolog primitives. We discuss the methods for executing sequences of unifications used in Prolog interpreters and show that many of them require even quadratic time in the worst case. We also outline some theoretically better methods.
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© 1986 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Mannila, H., Ukkonen, E. (1986). On the complexity of unification sequences. In: Shapiro, E. (eds) Third International Conference on Logic Programming. ICLP 1986. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 225. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-16492-8_69
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-16492-8_69
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