Summary: | Polynomial interpretations are a useful technique for proving termination of
term rewrite systems. They come in various flavors: polynomial interpretations
with real, rational and integer coefficients. As to their relationship with
respect to termination proving power, Lucas managed to prove in 2006 that there
are rewrite systems that can be shown polynomially terminating by polynomial
interpretations with real (algebraic) coefficients, but cannot be shown
polynomially terminating using polynomials with rational coefficients only. He
also proved the corresponding statement regarding the use of rational
coefficients versus integer coefficients. In this article we extend these
results, thereby giving the full picture of the relationship between the
aforementioned variants of polynomial interpretations. In particular, we show
that polynomial interpretations with real or rational coefficients do not
subsume polynomial interpretations with integer coefficients. Our results hold
also for incremental termination proofs with polynomial interpretations.
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