1,219 research outputs found
Fair termination revisited - with delay
AbstractA proof method for establishing the fair termination and total correctness of both nondeterministic and concurrent programs is presented. The method calls for the extension of state by auxiliary delay variables which count down to the instant in which certain action will be scheduled. It then uses well-founded ranking to prove fair termination allowing nested fair selection and loops
Fifty years of Hoare's Logic
We present a history of Hoare's logic.Comment: 79 pages. To appear in Formal Aspects of Computin
A Theory of Formal Synthesis via Inductive Learning
Formal synthesis is the process of generating a program satisfying a
high-level formal specification. In recent times, effective formal synthesis
methods have been proposed based on the use of inductive learning. We refer to
this class of methods that learn programs from examples as formal inductive
synthesis. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for formal
inductive synthesis. We discuss how formal inductive synthesis differs from
traditional machine learning. We then describe oracle-guided inductive
synthesis (OGIS), a framework that captures a family of synthesizers that
operate by iteratively querying an oracle. An instance of OGIS that has had
much practical impact is counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS). We
present a theoretical characterization of CEGIS for learning any program that
computes a recursive language. In particular, we analyze the relative power of
CEGIS variants where the types of counterexamples generated by the oracle
varies. We also consider the impact of bounded versus unbounded memory
available to the learning algorithm. In the special case where the universe of
candidate programs is finite, we relate the speed of convergence to the notion
of teaching dimension studied in machine learning theory. Altogether, the
results of the paper take a first step towards a theoretical foundation for the
emerging field of formal inductive synthesis
Simulation of Two-Way Pushdown Automata Revisited
The linear-time simulation of 2-way deterministic pushdown automata (2DPDA)
by the Cook and Jones constructions is revisited. Following the semantics-based
approach by Jones, an interpreter is given which, when extended with
random-access memory, performs a linear-time simulation of 2DPDA. The recursive
interpreter works without the dump list of the original constructions, which
makes Cook's insight into linear-time simulation of exponential-time automata
more intuitive and the complexity argument clearer. The simulation is then
extended to 2-way nondeterministic pushdown automata (2NPDA) to provide for a
cubic-time recognition of context-free languages. The time required to run the
final construction depends on the degree of nondeterminism. The key mechanism
that enables the polynomial-time simulations is the sharing of computations by
memoization.Comment: In Proceedings Festschrift for Dave Schmidt, arXiv:1309.455
A Temporal Logic for Hyperproperties
Hyperproperties, as introduced by Clarkson and Schneider, characterize the
correctness of a computer program as a condition on its set of computation
paths. Standard temporal logics can only refer to a single path at a time, and
therefore cannot express many hyperproperties of interest, including
noninterference and other important properties in security and coding theory.
In this paper, we investigate an extension of temporal logic with explicit path
variables. We show that the quantification over paths naturally subsumes other
extensions of temporal logic with operators for information flow and knowledge.
The model checking problem for temporal logic with path quantification is
decidable. For alternation depth 1, the complexity is PSPACE in the length of
the formula and NLOGSPACE in the size of the system, as for linear-time
temporal logic
Matrix Code
Matrix Code gives imperative programming a mathematical semantics and
heuristic power comparable in quality to functional and logic programming. A
program in Matrix Code is developed incrementally from a specification in
pre/post-condition form. The computations of a code matrix are characterized by
powers of the matrix when it is interpreted as a transformation in a space of
vectors of logical conditions. Correctness of a code matrix is expressed in
terms of a fixpoint of the transformation. The abstract machine for Matrix Code
is the dual-state machine, which we present as a variant of the classical
finite-state machine.Comment: 39 pages, 19 figures; extensions and minor correction
A Casual Tour Around a Circuit Complexity Bound
I will discuss the recent proof that the complexity class NEXP
(nondeterministic exponential time) lacks nonuniform ACC circuits of polynomial
size. The proof will be described from the perspective of someone trying to
discover it.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures. An earlier version appeared in SIGACT News,
September 201
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