Formal-Methods

Lessons I’ve learned from software engineering are uniformly cynical: Abstraction almost always fails; you can’t build something on top of a system without understanding how that system works. Bleeding-edge methods are a recipe for disaster Everything good is hype and you’ll only ever get a small fraction of the utility being promised. Imagine my surprise, then, when the Z3 constraint solver from Microsoft Research effortlessly dispatched the thorniest technical problem I’ve been given in my short professional career. [Read More]

Why are we here? What guarantees does formal verification provide? This question rests at the apex of a hierarchy of inquiry extending all the way down to how we can know anything at all! What do we mean by software correctness? There are precisely two different ways for a piece of software to be correct: The supreme deity of the universe descends from the heavens and decrees, with all the weight of Objective Truth, that a certain piece of software is correct. [Read More]