73,561 research outputs found
Synthesis of a simple self-stabilizing system
With the increasing importance of distributed systems as a computing
paradigm, a systematic approach to their design is needed. Although the area of
formal verification has made enormous advances towards this goal, the resulting
functionalities are limited to detecting problems in a particular design. By
means of a classical example, we illustrate a simple template-based approach to
computer-aided design of distributed systems based on leveraging the well-known
technique of bounded model checking to the synthesis setting.Comment: In Proceedings SYNT 2014, arXiv:1407.493
Mining State-Based Models from Proof Corpora
Interactive theorem provers have been used extensively to reason about
various software/hardware systems and mathematical theorems. The key challenge
when using an interactive prover is finding a suitable sequence of proof steps
that will lead to a successful proof requires a significant amount of human
intervention. This paper presents an automated technique that takes as input
examples of successful proofs and infers an Extended Finite State Machine as
output. This can in turn be used to generate proofs of new conjectures. Our
preliminary experiments show that the inferred models are generally accurate
(contain few false-positive sequences) and that representing existing proofs in
such a way can be very useful when guiding new ones.Comment: To Appear at Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics 201
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Expressivity in Natural and Artificial Systems
Roboticists are trying to replicate animal behavior in artificial systems.
Yet, quantitative bounds on capacity of a moving platform (natural or
artificial) to express information in the environment are not known. This paper
presents a measure for the capacity of motion complexity -- the expressivity --
of articulated platforms (both natural and artificial) and shows that this
measure is stagnant and unexpectedly limited in extant robotic systems. This
analysis indicates trends in increasing capacity in both internal and external
complexity for natural systems while artificial, robotic systems have increased
significantly in the capacity of computational (internal) states but remained
more or less constant in mechanical (external) state capacity. This work
presents a way to analyze trends in animal behavior and shows that robots are
not capable of the same multi-faceted behavior in rich, dynamic environments as
natural systems.Comment: Rejected from Nature, after review and appeal, July 4, 2018
(submitted May 11, 2018
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