A Note on Program Specialization. What Can Syntactical Properties of Residual Programs Reveal?

The paper presents two examples of non-traditional using of program specialization by Turchin's supercompilation method. In both cases we are interested in syntactical properties of residual programs produced by supercompilation. In the first example we apply supercompilation to a program encoding a word equation and as a result we obtain a program representing a graph describing the solution set of the word equation. The idea of the second example belongs to Alexandr V. Korlyukov. He considered an interpreter simulating the dynamic of the well known missionaries-cannibals puzzle. Supercompilation of the interpreter allows us to solve the puzzle. The interpreter may also be seen as an encoding of a non-deterministic protocol.