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(*   Copyright Dominique Larchey-Wendling [*]                 *)
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(*                             [*] Affiliation LORIA -- CNRS  *)
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(*      This file is distributed under the terms of the       *)
(*        Mozilla Public License Version 2.0, MPL-2.0         *)
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What is this library?

The library is build on top of Kruskal-Trees, Kruskal-Finite, Kruskal-AlmostFull, Kruskal-Higman and Kruskal-Veldman, and derives several instances of Kruskal's tree theorem for the homeomorphic embedding on rose trees, and of Higman's theorem for the product embedding on trees of bounded breadth (the terminology/name for "Higman's theorem" is Wim Veldman's).

If your wish is to understand the internals of the proof technique to establish Kruskal's tree theorem in inductive type theory, and its beauty btw, the place you want to look at is rather Kruskal-Veldman which contains most of the details of the proof arguments, largely inspired by, but at the same time improving on the pen&paper proof of Wim Veldman.

In here you will just find easy consequences of that result. The proofs of those derived theorems are much simpler, ie. all the complexity is hidden in the Kruskal-Veldman main result. Those easy proofs proceed via surjective relational morphisms, or, as a degenerate case of morphism, simple inclusion between relations.

How to install Kruskal-Theorems

It can be installed via opam since release v1.0 which is now included in coq-opam.

opam repo add coq-released https://coq.inria.fr/opam/released
opam update
opam install coq-kruskal-theorems

Notice that to import it in a development, as with Kruskal-AlmostFull, one should consistently choose between:

Mixing both versions is possible but hard and not recommended due to the total overlap of the namespaces except for the prefixes KruskalThm{Prop,Type}.

What are the main results

There are several formulations of Kruskal's tree theorem available depending on the exact representation of indexed rose trees, either as vectors of rose trees,... or list of rose trees which is the simplest to present:

Inductive ltree (X : Type) : Type :=
  | in_ltree : X → list (ltree X) → ltree X
where "⟨x|l⟩ₗ" := (@in_ltree _ x l).

Inductive list_embed {X Y} (R : X → Y → Prop) : list X → list Y → Prop :=
  | list_embed_nil :           [] ≤ₗ []
  | list_embed_head x l y m :  R x y → l ≤ₗ m → x::l ≤ₗ y::m
  | list_embed_skip l y m :    l ≤ₗ m → l ≤ₗ y::m
where "l ≤ₗ m" := (list_embed R l m).

Inductive ltree_homeo_embed {X} (R : rel₂ X) : ltree X → ltree X → Prop :=
  | homeo_embed_subt s t x l : t ∈ l → s ≤ₕ t → s ≤ₕ ⟨x|l⟩ₗ
  | homeo_embed_root x l y m : R x y → list_embed ≤ₕ l m → ⟨x|l⟩ₗ ≤ₕ ⟨y|m⟩ₗ
where "s ≤ₕ t" := (ltree_homeo_embed R s t).

Theorem af_ltree_homeo_embed X (R : rel₂ X) : af R → af (ltree_homeo_embed R).

and herein proved in kruskal_theorems.v. The predicate af characterizes almost full relations inductivelly and is defined and described in Kruskal-AlmostFull. So this is a more abstract formulation than that of Kruskal's tree theorem (because the af predicate abstracts the notion of Well Quasi Ordering in a constructive way.

From this theorem formulated abstractly, we derive a proof of Vazsonyi's conjecture (which turned out to be a theorem) and which is proved here in vazsonyi_theorems:

Theorem vazsonyi_theorem X (R : rel₂ (ltree X)) :
      (∀ s t x l, t ∈ l → R s t → R r ⟨x|l⟩ₗ)
    → (∀ x l y m, list_embed R l m → R ⟨x|l⟩ₗ ⟨y|m⟩ₗ)
    → ∀f : nat → ltree X, ∃ i j, i < j < n ∧ R (f i) (f j).

There, R abstract any relation closed for the two rules of the homeomorphic embedding.