Probabilistic Rewriting: Normalization, Termination, and Unique Normal Forms

Abstract

While a mature body of work supports the study of rewriting systems, abstract tools for Probabilistic Rewriting are still limited. We study in this setting questions such as uniqueness of the result (unique limit distribution) and normalizing strategies (is there a strategy to find a result with greatest probability?). The goal is to have tools to analyse the operational properties of probabilistic calculi (such as probabilistic lambda-calculi) whose evaluation is also non-deterministic, in the sense that different reductions are possible.