26,166 research outputs found
Carnap: an Open Framework for Formal Reasoning in the Browser
This paper presents an overview of Carnap, a free and open framework for the development of formal reasoning applications. Carnap’s design emphasizes flexibility, extensibility, and rapid prototyping. Carnap-based applications are written in Haskell, but can be compiled to JavaScript to run in standard web browsers. This combination of features makes Carnap ideally suited for educational applications, where ease-of-use is crucial for students and adaptability to different teaching strategies and classroom needs is crucial for instructors. The paper describes Carnap’s implementation, along with its current and projected pedagogical applications
"Boring formal methods" or "Sherlock Holmes deduction methods"?
This paper provides an overview of common challenges in teaching of logic and
formal methods to Computer Science and IT students. We discuss our experiences
from the course IN3050: Applied Logic in Engineering, introduced as a "logic
for everybody" elective course at at TU Munich, Germany, to engage pupils
studying Computer Science, IT and engineering subjects on Bachelor and Master
levels. Our goal was to overcome the bias that logic and formal methods are not
only very complicated but also very boring to study and to apply. In this
paper, we present the core structure of the course, provide examples of
exercises and evaluate the course based on the students' surveys.Comment: Preprint. Accepted to the Software Technologies: Applications and
Foundations (STAF 2016). Final version published by Springer International
Publishing AG. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1602.0517
Reasoning About a Simulated Printer Case Investigation with Forensic Lucid
In this work we model the ACME (a fictitious company name) "printer case
incident" and make its specification in Forensic Lucid, a Lucid- and
intensional-logic-based programming language for cyberforensic analysis and
event reconstruction specification. The printer case involves a dispute between
two parties that was previously solved using the finite-state automata (FSA)
approach, and is now re-done in a more usable way in Forensic Lucid. Our
simulation is based on the said case modeling by encoding concepts like
evidence and the related witness accounts as an evidential statement context in
a Forensic Lucid program, which is an input to the transition function that
models the possible deductions in the case. We then invoke the transition
function (actually its reverse) with the evidential statement context to see if
the evidence we encoded agrees with one's claims and then attempt to
reconstruct the sequence of events that may explain the claim or disprove it.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 7 listings, TOC, index; this article closely
relates to arXiv:0906.0049 and arXiv:0904.3789 but to remain stand-alone
repeats some of the background and introductory content; abstract presented
at HSC'09 and the full updated paper at ICDF2C'11. This is an updated/edited
version after ICDF2C proceedings with more references and correction
The Dafny Integrated Development Environment
In recent years, program verifiers and interactive theorem provers have
become more powerful and more suitable for verifying large programs or proofs.
This has demonstrated the need for improving the user experience of these tools
to increase productivity and to make them more accessible to non-experts. This
paper presents an integrated development environment for Dafny-a programming
language, verifier, and proof assistant-that addresses issues present in most
state-of-the-art verifiers: low responsiveness and lack of support for
understanding non-obvious verification failures. The paper demonstrates several
new features that move the state-of-the-art closer towards a verification
environment that can provide verification feedback as the user types and can
present more helpful information about the program or failed verifications in a
demand-driven and unobtrusive way.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2014, arXiv:1404.578
Theoretical models of the role of visualisation in learning formal reasoning
Although there is empirical evidence that visualisation tools can help students to learn formal subjects such as logic, and although particular strategies and conceptual difficulties have been identified, it has so far proved difficult to provide a general model of learning in this context that accounts for these findings in a systematic way. In this paper, four attempts at explaining the relative difficulty of formal concepts and the role of visualisation in this learning process are presented. These explanations draw on several existing theories, including Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, Green's Cognitive Dimensions, the Popper-Campbell model of conjectural learning, and cognitive complexity.
The paper concludes with a comparison of the utility and applicability of the different models. It is also accompanied by a reflexive commentary[0] (linked to this paper as a hypertext) that examines the ways in which theory has been used within these arguments, and which attempts to relate these uses to the wider context of learning technology research
- …