From Monadic Logic to PSL [chapter]

Moshe Y. Vardi
Pillars of Computer Science  
Two major themes of my research have been finite model theory and the automata theoretic approach. Boaz Trakhtenbrot laid the foundations in both areas. In 1950, he proved the undecidability of the satisfiability in the finite problem for first-order logic. His contributions to the automata-theoretic approach are described in this paper. I met Boaz in a seminar in 1981, when I was a doctoral student. Little did I know then that his work would have such a profound impact on my future research.
more » ... stract. One of the surprising developments in the area of program verification is how ideas introduced originally by logicians in the 1950s ended up yielding by 2003 an industrial-standard property-specification language called PSL. This development was enabled by the equally unlikely transformation of the mathematical machinery of automata on infinite words, introduced in the early 1960s for second-order arithmetics, into effective algorithms for model-checking tools. This paper attempts to trace the tangled threads of this development.
doi:10.1007/978-3-540-78127-1_36 dblp:conf/birthday/Vardi08 fatcat:jvbned4zxnaide4nv2dsf4xnoa