Abstract
Program result checking is concerned with designing programs to check their work. For example, after solving an equation for x, a result-checking program would substitute x back into the equation to make sure that the answer obtained is correct. There are many ways to check results, but there has been no theory to say what constitutes a good check. It is not a good check, for example, to redo a computation without change a second time. Such recomputation may uncover an intermittent hardware fault, but it will not uncover a software fault, and the discovery and elimination of software faults is the principal goal of this work. This talk discusses the concept of result checking, gives several examples, and outlines the basic theory.
This work was supported in part by NSF grant CCR92-01092, in part by IBM Research Division, T.J. Watson Research Center, and in part by ICSI, the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA.
A preliminary version of this paper appeared in Blum and Raghavan [BR].
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Blum, M. (1993). Program result checking: A new approach to making programs more reliable. In: Lingas, A., Karlsson, R., Carlsson, S. (eds) Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 700. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56939-1_57
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56939-1_57
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