Heuristics for Determining Equivalence of Program Mutations.
Douglas E. Baldwin, Frederick G. Sayward · 1979
A mutant M of a program P is a program derived from P by making some well defined simple change in P. Some initial investigations on automatically detecting equivalent mutants of a program are presented. The idea is based on the observation that compiler optimization can be considered a process of altering a program to an equivalent but more efficient mutant of the program. Thus the inverse of compiler optimization techniques can be seen as, in essence, equivalent mutant detection. (Author)