Thom Frühwirth presented a short, elegant and efficient Prolog program for the n queens problem. However the program may be seen as rather tricky and one may not be convinced about its correctness. This paper explains the program in a declarative way, and provides proofs of its correctness and completeness. The specification and the proofs are declarative, i.e. they abstract from any operational semantics. The specification is approximate, it is unnecessary to describe the program's semantics exactly. Despite the program works on non-ground terms, this work employs the standard semantics, based on logical consequence and Herbrand interpretations.
Another purpose of the paper is to present an example of precise declarative reasoning about the semantics of a logic program.
Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).
Thom Frühwirth presented a short, elegant and efficient Prolog program for the n queens problem. However the program may be seen as rather tricky and one may be not convinced about its correctness. This paper explains the program in a declarative way, and provides proofs of its correctness and completeness. The specification and the proofs are declarative, i.e. they abstract from any operational semantics. The specification is approximate, it is unnecessary to describe the program's semantics exactly. Despite the program works on non-ground terms, this work employs the standard semantics, base…
We discuss proving correctness and completeness of definite clause logic programs. We propose a method for proving completeness, while for proving correctness we employ a method which should be well known but is often neglected. Also, we show how to prove completeness and correctness in the presence of SLD-tree pruning, and point out that approximate specifications simplify specifications and proofs. We compare the proof methods to declarative diagnosis (algorithmic debugging), showing that approximate specifications eliminate a major drawback of the latter. We argue that our proof methods ref…
Program correctness (in imperative and functional programming) splits in logic programming into correctness and completeness. Completeness means that a program produces all the answers required by its specification. Little work has been devoted to reasoning about completeness. This paper presents a few sufficient conditions for completeness of definite programs. We also study preserving completeness under some cases of pruning of SLD-trees (e.g. due to using the cut). We treat logic programming as a declarative paradigm, abstracting from any operational semantics as far as possible. We argue t…
Local Completeness Logic (LCL) has been put forward as a program logic for proving both the correctness and incorrectness of program specifications. LCL is an abstract logic, parameterized by an abstract domain that allows combining over- and under-approximations of program behaviors. It turns out that LCL instantiated to the trivial singleton abstraction boils down to O'Hearn incorrectness logic, which allows us to prove the presence of program bugs. It has been recently proved that suitable extensions of Kleene algebra with tests (KAT) allow representing both O'Hearn incorrectness and Hoare …
The s-semantics makes it possible to explicitly deal with variables in program answers. So it seems suitable for programs using nonground data structures, like open lists. However it is difficult to find published examples of using the s-semantics to reason about particular programs. Here we apply s-semantics to prove correctness and completeness of Frühwirth's $n$ queens program. This is compared with a proof, published elsewhere, based on the standard semantics and Herbrand interpretations.
This paper presents an example of formal reasoning about the semantics of a Prolog program of practical importance (the SAT solver of Howe and King). The program is treated as a definite clause logic program with added control. The logic program is constructed by means of stepwise refinement, hand in hand with its correctness and completeness proofs. The proofs are declarative - they do not refer to any operational semantics. Each step of the logic program construction follows a systematic approach to constructing programs which are provably correct and complete. We also prove that correctness…
Just Verification of Mutual Exclusion Algorithms with (Non-)Blocking and (Non-)Atomic Registers
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学信息学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学计算机科学与工程系）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）
Hoare logic provides a syntax-oriented method to reason about program correctness and has been proven effective in the verification of classical and probabilistic programs. Existing proposals for quantum Hoare logic either lack completeness or support only quantum variables, thus limiting their capability in practical use. In this paper, we propose a quantum Hoare logic for a simple while language which involves both classical and quantum variables. Its soundness and relative completeness are proven for both partial and total correctness of quantum programs written in the language. Remarkably,…
We initiate the study of parallel quantum programming by defining the operational and denotational semantics of parallel quantum programs. The technical contributions of this paper include: (1) find a series of useful proof rules for reasoning about correctness of parallel quantum programs; (2) prove a (relative) completeness of our proof rules for partial correctness of disjoint parallel quantum programs; and (3) prove a strong soundness theorem of the proof rules showing that partial correctness is well maintained at each step of transitions in the operational semantics of a general parallel…
Distributed quantum systems and especially the Quantum Internet have the ever-increasing potential to fully demonstrate the power of quantum computation. This is particularly true given that developing a general-purpose quantum computer is much more difficult than connecting many small quantum devices. One major challenge of implementing distributed quantum systems is programming them and verifying their correctness. In this paper, we propose a CSP-like distributed programming language to facilitate the specification and verification of such systems. After presenting its operational and denota…
In his seminal paper of 2004, Ulrich Junker proposed the QuickXPlain algorithm, which provides a divide-and-conquer computation strategy to find within a given set an irreducible subset with a particular (monotone) property. Beside its original application in the domain of constraint satisfaction problems, the algorithm has since then found widespread adoption in areas as different as model-based diagnosis, recommender systems, verification, or the Semantic Web. This popularity is due to the frequent occurrence of the problem of finding irreducible subsets on the one hand, and to QuickXPlain's…
AIProver: Agentic Auto-Formalization of Mathematical Research via Certificate-Driven Evolving Harness
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Foothill College（山麓学院）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
