Constraint satisfaction problems in clausal form

This is the report-version of a mini-series of two articles on the foundations of satisfiability of conjunctive normal forms with non-boolean variables, to appear in Fundamenta Informaticae, 2011. These two parts are here bundled in one report, each part yielding a chapter. Generalised conjunctive normal forms are considered, allowing literals of the form "variable not-equal value". The first part sets the foundations for the theory of autarkies, with emphasise on matching autarkies. Main results concern various polynomial time results in dependency on the deficiency. The second part considers translations to boolean clause-sets and irredundancy as well as minimal unsatisfiability. Main results concern classification of minimally unsatisfiable clause-sets and the relations to the hermitian rank of graphs. Both parts contain also discussions of many open problems.Comment: 91 pages, to appear in Fundamenta Informaticae, 2011, as Constraint satisfaction problems in clausal form I: Autarkies and deficiency, Constraint satisfaction problems in clausal form II: Minimal unsatisfiability and conflict structur

Inspection Methods in Programming

The work reported here lies in the area of overlap between artificial intelligence software engineering. As research in artificial intelligence, it is a step towards a model of problem solving in the domain of programming. In particular, this work focuses on the routine aspects of programming which involve the application of previous experience with similar programs. I call this programming by inspection. Programming is viewed here as a kind of engineering activity. Analysis and synthesis by inspection area prominent part of expert problem solving in many other engineering disciplines, such as electrical and mechanical engineering. The notion of inspections methods in programming developed in this work is motivated by similar notions in other areas of engineering. This work is also motivated by current practical concerns in the area of software engineering. The inadequacy of current programming technology is universally recognized. Part of the solution to this problem will be to increase the level of automation in programming. I believe that the next major step in the evolution of more automated programming will be interactive systems which provide a mixture of partially automated program analysis, synthesis and verification. One such system being developed at MIT, called the programmer's apprentice, is the immediate intended application of this work. This report concentrates on the knowledge are of the programmer's apprentice, which is the form of a taxonomy of commonly used algorithms and data structures. To the extent that a programmer is able to construct and manipulate programs in terms of the forms in such a taxonomy, he may relieve himself of many details and generally raise the conceptual level of his interaction with the system, as compared with present day programming environments. Also, since it is practical to expand a great deal of effort pre-analyzing the entries in a library, the difficulty of verifying the correctness of programs constructed this way is correspondingly reduced. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated by the design of an initial library of common techniques for manipulating symbolic data. This document also reports on the further development of a formalism called the plan calculus for specifying computations in a programming language independent manner. This formalism combines both data and control abstraction in a uniform framework that has facilities for representing multiple points of view and side effects

Ordered direct implication basis of a finite closure system

Closure system on a nite set is a unifying concept in logic programming, relational data bases and knowledge systems. It can also be presented in the terms of nite lattices, and the tools of economic description of a nite lattice have long existed in lattice theory. We present this approach by describing the so-called D-basis and introducing the concept of ordered direct basis of an implicational system. A direct basis of a closure operator, or an implicational system, is a set of implications that allows one to compute the closure of an arbitrary set by a single iteration. This property is preserved by the D-basis at the cost of following a prescribed order in which implications will be attended. In particular, using an ordered direct basis allows to optimize the forward chaining procedure in logic programming that uses the Horn fragment of propositional logic. One can extract the D-basis from any direct unit basis in time polynomial in the size s( ), and it takes only linear time of the cardinality of the D-basis to put it into a proper order. We produce examples of closure systems on a 6-element set, for which the canonical basis of Duquenne and Guigues is not ordered direc

Ordered direct implicational basis of a finite closure system

Closure system on a finite set is a unifying concept in logic programming, relational data bases and knowledge systems. It can also be presented in the terms of finite lattices, and the tools of economic description of a finite lattice have long existed in lattice theory. We present this approach by describing the so-called D-basis and introducing the concept of ordered direct basis of an implicational system. A direct basis of a closure operator, or an implicational system, is a set of implications that allows one to compute the closure of an arbitrary set by a single iteration. This property is preserved by the D-basis at the cost of following a prescribed order in which implications will be attended. In particular, using an ordered direct basis allows to optimize the forward chaining procedure in logic programming that uses the Horn fragment of propositional logic. One can extract the D-basis from any direct unit basis S in time polynomial in the size of S, and it takes only linear time of the cardinality of the D-basis to put it into a proper order. We produce examples of closure systems on a 6-element set, for which the canonical basis of Duquenne and Guigues is not ordered direct.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures; presented at AMS conference, TACL-2011,ISAIM-2012 and at RUTCOR semina

Fibrations in CICY Threefolds

In this work we systematically enumerate genus one fibrations in the class of 7,890 Calabi-Yau manifolds defined as complete intersections in products of projective spaces, the so-called CICY threefolds. This survey is independent of the description of the manifolds and improves upon past approaches that probed only a particular algebraic form of the threefolds (i.e. searches for "obvious" genus one fibrations as in [1,2]). We also study K3-fibrations and nested fibration structures. That is, K3 fibrations with potentially many distinct elliptic fibrations. To accomplish this survey a number of new geometric tools are developed including a determination of the full topology of all CICY threefolds, including triple intersection numbers. In 2,946 cases this involves finding a new "favorable" description of the manifold in which all divisors descend from a simple ambient space. Our results consist of a survey of obvious fibrations for all CICY threefolds and a complete classification of all genus one fibrations for 4,957 "Kahler favorable" CICYs whose Kahler cones descend from a simple ambient space. Within the CICY dataset, we find 139,597 obvious genus one fibrations, 30,974 obvious K3 fibrations and 208,987 nested combinations. For the Kahler favorable geometries we find a complete classification of 377,559 genus one fibrations. For one manifold with Hodge numbers (19,19) we find an explicit description of an infinite number of distinct genus-one fibrations extending previous results for this particular geometry that have appeared in the literature. The data associated to this scan is available at http://www1.phys.vt.edu/cicydata .Comment: 54 pages, 4 tables, 4 figure

On the cohomology of Galois groups determined by Witt rings

Let F denote a field of characteristic different from two. In this paper we describe the mod 2 cohomology of a Galois group which is determined by the Witt ring WF

Design of a fault tolerant airborne digital computer. Volume 1: Architecture

This volume is concerned with the architecture of a fault tolerant digital computer for an advanced commercial aircraft. All of the computations of the aircraft, including those presently carried out by analogue techniques, are to be carried out in this digital computer. Among the important qualities of the computer are the following: (1) The capacity is to be matched to the aircraft environment. (2) The reliability is to be selectively matched to the criticality and deadline requirements of each of the computations. (3) The system is to be readily expandable. contractible, and (4) The design is to appropriate to post 1975 technology. Three candidate architectures are discussed and assessed in terms of the above qualities. Of the three candidates, a newly conceived architecture, Software Implemented Fault Tolerance (SIFT), provides the best match to the above qualities. In addition SIFT is particularly simple and believable. The other candidates, Bus Checker System (BUCS), also newly conceived in this project, and the Hopkins multiprocessor are potentially more efficient than SIFT in the use of redundancy, but otherwise are not as attractive

NASA Space Engineering Research Center Symposium on VLSI Design

The NASA Space Engineering Research Center (SERC) is proud to offer, at its second symposium on VLSI design, presentations by an outstanding set of individuals from national laboratories and the electronics industry. These featured speakers share insights into next generation advances that will serve as a basis for future VLSI design. Questions of reliability in the space environment along with new directions in CAD and design are addressed by the featured speakers