On the Expressive Power of 2-Stack Visibly Pushdown Automata

Visibly pushdown automata are input-driven pushdown automata that recognize some non-regular context-free languages while preserving the nice closure and decidability properties of finite automata. Visibly pushdown automata with multiple stacks have been considered recently by La Torre, Madhusudan, and Parlato, who exploit the concept of visibility further to obtain a rich automata class that can even express properties beyond the class of context-free languages. At the same time, their automata are closed under boolean operations, have a decidable emptiness and inclusion problem, and enjoy a logical characterization in terms of a monadic second-order logic over words with an additional nesting structure. These results require a restricted version of visibly pushdown automata with multiple stacks whose behavior can be split up into a fixed number of phases. In this paper, we consider 2-stack visibly pushdown automata (i.e., visibly pushdown automata with two stacks) in their unrestricted form. We show that they are expressively equivalent to the existential fragment of monadic second-order logic. Furthermore, it turns out that monadic second-order quantifier alternation forms an infinite hierarchy wrt words with multiple nestings. Combining these results, we conclude that 2-stack visibly pushdown automata are not closed under complementation. Finally, we discuss the expressive power of B\"{u}chi 2-stack visibly pushdown automata running on infinite (nested) words. Extending the logic by an infinity quantifier, we can likewise establish equivalence to existential monadic second-order logic

Coherency of Shared Memory in Ad-Hoc Networks

Memory coherence is a commonly accepted correctness criterion for distributed shared-memory computing platforms. Coherence is formulated assuming a static architecture in which all processors can communicate with one another. In this paper, we argue that the classical notion is not appropriate for ad-hoc networks consisting of mobile devices with constantly changing communication topology. We introduce and formalize a new correctness criterion, called group coherence, as a suitable abstract specification for shared-memory computing architectures over ad-hoc networks. We show that two existing systems, the Coda file system and Lampson’s global naming scheme, satisfy our definition. Finally, we propose a timestamp-based extension of the popular Snoopy cache coherence protocol for caching in ad-hoc networks, and show it to be group coherent

A proof of strong normalisation using domain theory

Ulrich Berger presented a powerful proof of strong normalisation using domains, in particular it simplifies significantly Tait's proof of strong normalisation of Spector's bar recursion. The main contribution of this paper is to show that, using ideas from intersection types and Martin-Lof's domain interpretation of type theory one can in turn simplify further U. Berger's argument. We build a domain model for an untyped programming language where U. Berger has an interpretation only for typed terms or alternatively has an interpretation for untyped terms but need an extra condition to deduce strong normalisation. As a main application, we show that Martin-L\"{o}f dependent type theory extended with a program for Spector double negation shift.Comment: 16 page

Expressiveness of Streaming String Transducers

Streaming string transducers define (partial) functions from input strings to output strings. A streaming string transducer makes a single pass through the input string and uses a finite set of variables that range over strings from the output alphabet. At every step, the transducer processes an input symbol, and updates all the variables in parallel using assignments whose right-hand-sides are concatenations of output symbols and variables with the restriction that a variable can be used at most once in a right-hand-side expression. It has been shown that streaming string transducers operating on strings over infinite data domains are of interest in algorithmic verification of list-processing programs, as they lead to Pspace decision procedures for checking pre/postconditions and for checking semantic equivalence, for a well-defined class of heap-manipulating programs. In order to understand the theoretical expressiveness of streaming transducers, we focus on streaming transducers processing strings over finite alphabets, given the existence of a robust and well-studied class of ``regular\u27\u27 transductions for this case. Such regular transductions can be defined either by two-way deterministic finite-state transducers, or using a logical MSO-based characterization. Our main result is that the expressiveness of streaming string transducers coincides exactly with this class of regular transductions

Contention-Free Complexity of Shared Memory Algorithms

AbstractWorst-case time complexity is a measure of the maximum time needed to solve a problem over all runs. Contention-free time complexity indicates the maximum time needed when a process executes by itself, without competition from other processes. Since contention is rare in well-designed systems, it is important to design algorithms which perform well in the absence of contention. We study the contention-free time complexity of shared memory algorithms using two measures: step complexity, which counts the number of accesses to shared registers; and register complexity, which measures the number of different registers accessed. Depending on the system architecture, one of the two measures more accurately reflects the elapsed time. We provide lower and upper bounds for the contention-free step and register complexity of solving the mutual exclusion problem as a function of the number of processes and the size of the largest register that can be accessed in one atomic step. We also present bounds on the worst-case and contention-free step and register complexities of solving the naming problem. These bounds illustrate that the proposed complexity measures are useful in differentiating among the computational powers of different primitive

Shared Variables Interaction Diagrams

Scenario-based specifications offer an intuitive and visual way of describing design requirements of distributed software systems. For the communication paradigm based on messages, message sequence charts (MSC) offer a standardized and formal notation amenable to formal analysis. In this paper, we define shared variables interaction diagrams (SVID) as the counterpart of MSCs when processes communicate via shared variables. After formally defining SVIDs, we develop an intuitive as well as formal definition of refinement for SVIDs. This notion provides a basis for systematically adding details to SVID requirements

Symbolic Analysis of GSMP Models With One Stateful Clock

We consider the problem of verifying reachability properties of stochastic real-time systems modeled as generalized semi-Markov processes (GSMPs). The standard simulation-based techniques for GSMPs are not adequate for solving verification problems, and existing symbolic techniques either require memoryless distributions for firing times, or approximate the problem using discrete time or bounded horizon. In this paper, we present a symbolic solution for the case where firing times are random variables over a rich class of distributions, but only one event is allowed to retain its firing time when a discrete change occurs. The solution allows us to compute the probability that such a GSMP satisfies a property of the form “can the system reach a target, while staying within a set of safe states”. We report on illustrative examples and their analysis using our procedure