Transcript Alloy

• Alloy = FOL + transitive closure + sets + relations
• bounded exhaustive search for counterexample
• sound but not complete
Alloy Model
Alloy
instance
spec
Alloy Analyzer
property
translate
formula
mapping
translate
instance
SAT
solver
boolean
instance
scope
boolean
formula
Alloy Case Studies
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firewire configuration protocol
unison file sychronizer
IMPP presence protocol for instant messaging
query interface in COM
key distribution for multicast
intentional naming
Chord distributed hash table
role-based access control
web ontologies
air traffic control protocols
telephone switch feature configuration
proton beam scheduling
Stephen Omohundro
"Modelling Cellular Automata with Partial Differential Equations" (1984)
• modeled a 2D 9-neighbor cellular automata (CA) with 10 PDEs
• modeling discrete system (in space and time) as smooth continuous
• computation universal CA implies universal PDEs ?
• bump functions shifted on a lattice to represent state of cells
– height of bump is color of cell
• N(x, y, t) variable represents "now" state of CA, F represents future
S1 . . . S8 shift N to represent the 8 neighboring cells
R. W. Brockett
"Dynamical Systems that Sort Lists, Diagonalize Matrices, and Solve
Linear Programming Problems" (1988)
• solve standard math problems with
H  H , H , N 
H, N are square symmetric matrices, [A, B] = AB - BA
• describes a gradient flow on space of orthogonal matrices
• use gradient flow property to diagonalize a symmetric matrix
• solve linear programming when constraint set is a convex polytope
• H can evolve to a sort the diagonals of a matrix
Cristopher Moore
"Unpredictability and Undecidability in Dynamical Systems" (1990)
• can answer long-term questions about chaotic systems providing
initial conditions are known precisely
• identified dynamical systems that one cannot answer long-term
questions about even if initial conditions known precisely
• system evolution described as a Generalized Shift Map (GSM)
• GSMs equivalent to Turing machines → computation universal
• questions about the behavior of GSM systems undecidable
• one such system: particle moving in a 3 dimensional potential
 physical systems can be computers
Sorting as Optimization Problem
given a list of numbers
define sorted:
x1 , x2 ,, xn
i [1, n 1] : xi  xi 1
n 1
sorted
  sgn(xi  xi 1 )
is minimal
i 1
fun exercise to show how each step of a
sorting algorithm keeps this minimal