views must be simpler but true Nobody doubts the value of abstraction, but it is essential to remember that everything that we can derive from an abstraction must be true of the real thing. If we can derive something that is not actually true, what we have is not an abstraction but a lie. Our role model should be engineers, not philosophers or logicians Engineers use mathematics in very differe...

Medical practice protocols or guidelines are statements to assist practitioners and patient decisions about appropriate health care for specific circumstances. In order to reach their potential benefits, protocols must fulfill strong quality requirements. Medical bodies worldwide have made efforts in this direction, mostly using informal methods such as peer review of protocols. We are concerne...

Formal methods tools have greatly influenced our ability to increase the reliability of software and hardware systems by revealing errors and clarifying critical concepts. In this article we show how a rich specification language and a theorem prover for it have contributed to the design and implementation of verifiably correct adaptive protocols. The protocol building team included experts in ...

0272-1732/99/$10.00  1999 IEEE Hardware verification accounts for a considerable portion of the costs in the microprocessor design process. Traditionally, designers have verified microprocessor designs using simulation techniques that help find most design faults. However, simulation never guarantees the correct operation of the final product. Some design faults are very difficult to detect by...

Tools for a specification language can be implemented directly (by building a special purpose theorem prover) or by a conservative embedding into a typed meta-logic, which allows their safe and logically consistent implementation and the reuse of existing theorem prover engines. For being useful, the conservative extension approach must provide derivations for several thousand “folklore” theore...