Playing with Maude

Mathematical games and puzzles of all sorts constitute an important subclass of mathematical problems, with a long tradition and an extensive literature [20, 135, 11, 287]. Most of them have in common the fact that they are easy to state and understand, which does not mean that a precise solution is always trivial to find.

In this chapter we make use of Maude system modules to present and illustrate some general techniques that allow solving a diverse enough selection of these problems. We are not concerned with finding neat and concise mathematical solutions, but rather we would like to find out how easy it is to express those problems in the rewriting logic formalism underlying Maude, and how far we can go in their resolution by the use of just brute force and as little ingenuity as possible. In this regard, a clear conclusion is that many of these problems can be represented/specified in Maude in a much simpler way than it would be possible in more conventional languages.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Informática, Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación, s/n 28040 Madrid, Spain

   Manuel Clavel & Narciso Martí-Oliet

2. Universidad de Málaga, Departamento de Lenguajes y Ciencias de la Computación, Boulevard Louis Pasteur, s/n. Campus de Teatinos, 29071 Málaga, Spain

   Francisco Durán

3. SRI International, Computer Science Laboratory, 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025-3493, USA

   Steven Eker & Patrick Lincoln

4. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Computer Science, Siebel Center for Computer Science, 201 N. Goodwin, Urbana, IL 61801-2302, USA

   José Meseguer

5. SRI International, USA

   Carolyn Talcott

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