The set-unification and set-matching problems, which are very restricted cases of the associative-commutative-idempotent unification and matching problems, respectively, are shown to be NP-complete. The NP-completeness of the subsumption check in first-order resolution follows from these results. It is also shown that commutative-idempotent matching and associative-idempotent matching are NP-hard, thus implying that the idempotency of a function does not help in reducing the complexity of matching and unification problems.
Partially supported by the National Science Foundation Grant no. DCR-8408461.