Cancellativity in finitely presented semigroups
The question of whether a monoid presented by a finite Thue system
is cancellative is shown to be recursively undecidable, even when
the Thue system is Church-Rosser. A decision procedure is described for
the case of monadic Church-Rosser Thue systems, and general commutative
Thue systems. For canonical commutative systems, the negation of
the problem is in NP.