[Termination tools] announcement termination competition

[Salvador Lucas]

Dear friends,

H. Zantema wrote:

>We plan to generate the same information on the result web page
>as last year, including computation time. So any one interested 
>in the number of systems that could be solved within one second
>for each of the tools, can easily filter out this information
>from the result page. I am in favor of adding some more statistics
>on the result page than only the total number of systems that have been
>solved, and consider the number of systems solved within one second
>as a candidate. I will discuss this with Claude.
>
Regarding this, I completely agree that such big experiments are
worth to have a deep statistical analysis. In this sense, I would like
to draw your attention to a recent technical report where I used
(and worked) the results of the 2004 competition to compare
transformations for proving termination of CSR:

   http://www.dsic.upv.es/~slucas/papers/tr1804/tr1804.pdf

I think that some generic ideas in this paper (see Section 6) could
be useful to obtain interesting conclusions from the experiments.

Probably, a thorough (previous) planning of the tests would help a lot
to obtain interesting conclusions from the experimental data.

Best regards,

Salvador.