Historical contingency and determinism are often cast as opposing paradigms under which evolutionary diversification operates. It may be, however, that both factors act together to promote evolutionary divergence, although there are few examples of such interaction in nature. We tested phylogenetic predictions of an explicit historical model of divergence (double invasions of freshwater by mari...

There has been much recent interest in supporting deterministic parallelism in imperative programs. Structured parallel programming models have used type systems or static analysis to enforce determinism by constraining potential interference of lexically scoped tasks. But similar support for multithreaded programming, where threads may be ubiquitously spawned with arbitrary lifetimes, especial...

We survey in this paper some variants of the notion of determinism, refining the spectrum betweennon-determinism and determinism. We present unambiguous automata, strongly unambiguousautomata, prophetic automata, guidable automata, and history-deterministic automata. Weinstantiate these various notions for finite words, infinite words, finite trees, infinite trees, datalanguages...

Multicore architectures are becoming prevalent and bring many programming challenges. One of the biggest challenges is non-determinism: the output of a program depends not only on the input, but also on the scheduling choices taken by the operating system. My interests lie in investigating techniques and tools that aid determinism, such as libraries and compilers that provide deterministic cons...

Mercury is a new purely declarative logic programming language. The Mercury determinism system allows programmers to specify which predicates never fail and which predicates succeed at most once. This information allows the compiler to check the program for errors, pinpointing predicates that do not satisfy their declarations. This makes programmers signiicantly more productive and enhances the...