Abstract
Puzzles and games give a strong motivation for humans to deal with formal objects: people spend hours and hours in seemingly useless board games, moving pebbles or cards according to prescribed rules, trying to beat their opponent in a game or just solving a puzzle. In this position paper we show how to use this human obsession in order to teach students formal methods, in particular, SAT solving and model checking.
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper, we use the symbols |, & and ! for logical disjunction, conjunction, and negation.
- 2.
As above, in the actual SMV code, variable array bounds or indices, e.g., vpos[i], are not allowed and have to be replaced by the respective constant values vpos[1],vpos[2],....
- 3.
ISPL does not admit arrays, these must be expanded by a suitable pre-processor. Furthermore, ISPL has some syntactic peculiarities which do not contribute to the goals of this article and, thus, are left out. The full code of all examples in this article can be obtained from the author.
- 4.
Actually, Tourality is a GPS-based treasure hunt where real people are trying to outperform each other in reaching certain locations. We use a card-board abstraction of this game which was introduced in a German national competition for computer science education.
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Damian Kurpiewski for helpful discussions on MCMAS, and Stephan Merz for discussions on the game-based approach to model checking education. This research was supported by the German BMBF project “CrESt” on collaborative embedded systems, FKZ 01\(\mid \)S16043G/E.
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Schlingloff, BH. (2021). Teaching Model Checking via Games and Puzzles. In: Cerone, A., Roggenbach, M. (eds) Formal Methods – Fun for Everybody. FMFun 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1301. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71374-4_7
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