Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Program synthesis
In computer science, program synthesis is the task to construct a program that provably satisfies a given high-level formal specification. In contrast to program verification, the program is to be constructed rather than given; however, both fields make use of formal proof techniques, and both comprise approaches of different degrees of automation. In contrast to automatic programming techniques, specifications in program synthesis are usually non-algorithmic statements in an appropriate logical calculus.
The primary application of program synthesis is to relieve the programmer of the burden of writing correct, efficient code that satisfies a specification. However, program synthesis also has applications to superoptimization and inference of loop invariants.
During the Summer Institute of Symbolic Logic at Cornell University in 1957, Alonzo Church defined the problem to synthesize a circuit from mathematical requirements. Even though the work only refers to circuits and not programs, the work is considered to be one of the earliest descriptions of program synthesis and some researchers refer to program synthesis as "Church's Problem". In the 1960s, a similar idea for an "automatic programmer" was explored by researchers in artificial intelligence.[citation needed]
Since then, various research communities considered the problem of program synthesis. Notable works include the 1969 automata-theoretic approach by Büchi and Landweber, and the works by Manna and Waldinger (c. 1980). The development of modern high-level programming languages can also be understood as a form of program synthesis.
The early 21st century has seen a surge of practical interest in the idea of program synthesis in the formal verification community and related fields. Armando Solar-Lezama showed that it is possible to encode program synthesis problems in Boolean logic and use algorithms for the Boolean satisfiability problem to automatically find programs.
In 2013, a unified framework for program synthesis problems called Syntax-guided Synthesis (stylized SyGuS) was proposed by researchers at UPenn, UC Berkeley, and MIT. The input to a SyGuS algorithm consists of a logical specification along with a context-free grammar of expressions that constrains the syntax of valid solutions. For example, to synthesize a function f that returns the maximum of two integers, the logical specification might look like this:
(f(x,y) = x ∨ f(x,y) = y) ∧ f(x,y) ≥ x ∧ f(x,y) ≥ y
and the grammar might be:
Hub AI
Program synthesis AI simulator
(@Program synthesis_simulator)
Program synthesis
In computer science, program synthesis is the task to construct a program that provably satisfies a given high-level formal specification. In contrast to program verification, the program is to be constructed rather than given; however, both fields make use of formal proof techniques, and both comprise approaches of different degrees of automation. In contrast to automatic programming techniques, specifications in program synthesis are usually non-algorithmic statements in an appropriate logical calculus.
The primary application of program synthesis is to relieve the programmer of the burden of writing correct, efficient code that satisfies a specification. However, program synthesis also has applications to superoptimization and inference of loop invariants.
During the Summer Institute of Symbolic Logic at Cornell University in 1957, Alonzo Church defined the problem to synthesize a circuit from mathematical requirements. Even though the work only refers to circuits and not programs, the work is considered to be one of the earliest descriptions of program synthesis and some researchers refer to program synthesis as "Church's Problem". In the 1960s, a similar idea for an "automatic programmer" was explored by researchers in artificial intelligence.[citation needed]
Since then, various research communities considered the problem of program synthesis. Notable works include the 1969 automata-theoretic approach by Büchi and Landweber, and the works by Manna and Waldinger (c. 1980). The development of modern high-level programming languages can also be understood as a form of program synthesis.
The early 21st century has seen a surge of practical interest in the idea of program synthesis in the formal verification community and related fields. Armando Solar-Lezama showed that it is possible to encode program synthesis problems in Boolean logic and use algorithms for the Boolean satisfiability problem to automatically find programs.
In 2013, a unified framework for program synthesis problems called Syntax-guided Synthesis (stylized SyGuS) was proposed by researchers at UPenn, UC Berkeley, and MIT. The input to a SyGuS algorithm consists of a logical specification along with a context-free grammar of expressions that constrains the syntax of valid solutions. For example, to synthesize a function f that returns the maximum of two integers, the logical specification might look like this:
(f(x,y) = x ∨ f(x,y) = y) ∧ f(x,y) ≥ x ∧ f(x,y) ≥ y
and the grammar might be: