2008 Turing Award Winners Announced 66
The Association for Computing Machinery has announced the 2008 Turing Award Winners. Edmund M. Clarke, Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis received the award for their work on an automated method for finding design errors in computer hardware and software. "Model Checking is a type of "formal verification" that analyzes the logic underlying a design, much as a mathematician uses a proof to determine that a theorem is correct. Far from hit or miss, Model Checking considers every possible state of a hardware or software design and determines if it is consistent with the designer's specifications. Clarke and Emerson originated the idea of Model Checking at Harvard in 1981. They developed a theoretical technique for determining whether an abstract model of a hardware or software design satisfies a formal specification, given as a formula in Temporal Logic, a notation for describing possible sequences of events. Moreover, when the system fails the specification, it could identify a counterexample to show the source of the problem. Numerous model checking systems have been implemented, such as Spin at Bell Labs."
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Re:Just moves the errors up one level (Score:5, Informative)
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It took a long time but a lot of the major design houses (Intel, PMC sierra, Freescale, ST micro, IBM and such), now use a form or another of formal verification during their design cycle. It has been a silent revolution, but be assured that many modern microchips have been verified this way.
Perhaps some day we could have a succesful formal verification product for software (After all, Verilog and VHDL could be seen as programming languages no?). In the meantime, it has proven its worth on the hardware side. Congratulations are due to these pioneers.
Re:Just moves the errors up one level (Score:3, Informative)