[Termtools] Termination Competition 2009: Call for Participation

[Juergen Giesl]

                  Termination Competition 2009
                        December 16-20

                      Call for Participants

During the 90s a number of new, powerful termination methods was
developed. Thus, at the beginning of the millennium many research
groups started to develop tools for fully automated termination
analysis.

After a tool demonstration at the 2003 Workshop on Termination in
Valencia, the community decided to start an annual termination
competition to spur the development of tools and new termination
techniques.

The termination competition focuses on automated termination
analysis for all kinds of programming paradigms, including
categories for term rewriting, logic programming, functional
programming, and imperative programming. It serves to demonstrate
the power of the leading tools in each of these areas.

At the 2009 Workshop on Termination in Leipzig, the community
decided to move to an online execution. In every category,
all participating tools of that category are run
on a randomly selected subset of the available problems.

This new approach will be followed in the 2009 competition as well as
in the next live competition at FLoC 2010. Additionally, in this
competition a new category on Java bytecode programs will start.

Details about the new rules, machine configuration, etc. can be found
at

  http://termcomp.uibk.ac.at/status/rules.html

Due to the significant changes introduced in the competition and with
the aim of extracting as much knowledge as possible about the new
execution system and the new rules that will be used from now on in
the termination competition, we strongly encourage all developers of
termination tools to participate in the competition. Moreover, tools
are also encouraged to participate in as much categories of the competition
as possible.

Moreover, if there is no category that is convenient for your tool, you
can contact the organizers, since other categories can be considered
as well (this year or in 2010) if enough participants are guaranteed.

Important dates

Problem submission:   2 December 2009,   23:59 CET (Wednesday midnight)

Software requests:    2 December 2009,   23:59 CET (Wednesday midnight)

Tool submission:     14 December 2009,   12:01 CET (Monday midday)

Competition start:   16 December 2009,   12:01 CET (Wednesday midday)