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Comment by Sesse__

3 hours ago

Is the word problem easier if the monoids are commutative? (Or even trivial? I haven't thought deeply about it.)

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Sesse__

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hyperpape  2 hours ago

I haven't previously thought about this, but I think words over a commutative monoid are equivalent to a vector of non-negative integers, at which point you have vector addition systems, and I believe those are decidable, though still computationally incredibly hard: https://www.quantamagazine.org/an-easy-sounding-problem-yiel....

  • Sesse__  2 hours ago

    Thanks, that's an interesting tidbit!

    (The whole thing made me think about applications to SQL query optimizers, although I'm not sure if it's practically useful for anything.)