Playing with Maude

Abstract

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.