arXiv subjects

Benjamin Bisping

Publications and source records attributed to Benjamin Bisping.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Tempus fugit: Anyone can understand temporal logic if they have to save the realm

Often, the easiest way to learn something is to have to use it for a purpose. This purpose can be playful: In 'Tempus fugit', the player takes on the role of a magician who has to defeat enemies by casting spells. The applicability of spells and enemy attacks depends on the truth of formulas in linear temporal logic with past with respect to a trace that the player gradually builds. So, whoever wants to save the realm from monsters has to learn to read logic formulas. This paper describes the small browser game and explains our design choices. We expose how game mechanics connect to linear temporal logic with past over finite traces, and how this can help players approach a daunting topic like formal logic.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2025

Galois Energy Games: To Solve All Kinds of Quantitative Reachability Problems

We provide a generic decision procedure for energy games with energy-bounded attacker and reachability objective, moving beyond vector-valued energies and vector-addition updates. All we demand is that energies form well-founded bounded join-semilattices, and that energy updates have an upward-closed domain and can be "undone" through a Galois-connected function. We instantiate these Galois energy games to common energy games, declining energy games, multi-weighted reachability games, coverability on vector addition systems with states and shortest path problems, supported by an Isabelle-formalization and two implementations. For these instantiations, our simple algorithm is polynomial w.r.t. game graph size and exponential w.r.t. dimension.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2024

One Energy Game for the Spectrum between Branching Bisimilarity and Weak Trace Semantics

We provide the first generalized game characterization of van Glabbeek's linear-time--branching-time spectrum with silent steps. Thereby, one multi-dimensional energy game can be used to characterize and decide a wide array of weak behavioral equivalences between stability-respecting branching bisimilarity and weak trace equivalence in one go. To establish correctness, we relate attacker-winning energy budgets and distinguishing sublanguages of Hennessy--Milner logic that we characterize by eight dimensions of formula expressiveness.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2023

Linear-Time--Branching-Time Spectroscopy Accounting for Silent Steps

cs.LO↗

arXiv2023

Process Equivalence Problems as Energy Games

We characterize all common notions of behavioral equivalence by one 6-dimensional energy game, where energies bound capabilities of an attacker trying to tell processes apart. The defender-winning initial credits exhaustively determine which preorders and equivalences from the (strong) linear-time--branching-time spectrum relate processes. The time complexity is exponential, which is optimal due to trace equivalence being covered. This complexity improves drastically on our recent approach for deciding groups of equivalences where exponential sets of distinguishing HML formulas are constructed on top of a super-exponential reachability game. In experiments using the VLTS benchmarks, the algorithm performs on par with the best similarity algorithm.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2021

Deciding All Behavioral Equivalences at Once: A Game for Linear-Time--Branching-Time Spectroscopy

We introduce a generalization of the bisimulation game that finds distinguishing Hennessy-Milner logic formulas from every finitary, subformula-closed language in van Glabbeek's linear-time--branching-time spectrum between two finite-state processes. We identify the relevant dimensions that measure expressive power to yield formulas belonging to the coarsest distinguishing behavioral preorders and equivalences; the compared processes are equivalent in each coarser behavioral equivalence from the spectrum. We prove that the induced algorithm can determine the best fit of (in)equivalences for a pair of processes.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2021

A Game Characterization for Contrasimilarity

We present the first game characterization of contrasimilarity, the weakest form of bisimilarity. The game is finite for finite-state processes and can thus be used for contrasimulation equivalence checking, of which no tool has been capable to date. A machine-checked Isabelle/HOL formalization backs our work and enables further use of contrasimilarity in verification contexts.

cs.GT↗