Late night pool

By AG
Free snacks, free bowling and free pool....we won't miss such many ;)

Periodically, a small recreation center here in the school opens up their store for poor people like us...to play for free ;) And usually its late at nights, like 11 pm to 1 pm. Has all the cool crowd, disco lights and an ambience filled with energy with ear-deafening music. Yesterday had plentiful of play with friends. Am not good at either of the games...but everytime its just the beginer's luck that I rely on ;) Played through the night, and consequence? Missed early morning class :( No one in the room woke-up.

Right now working on an assignment, waiting for Alloy to come up with a counter example. Alloy is a constraint analyzer tool for software validation and verification course. Its a very powerful structural model verification tool developed at MIT. And its fun modelling real world things into Alloy and specifying the constraints on the model as per the specifications...they have to be just right..not less not more. You got to have the complete idea of the model, and then its feeded into alloy. Its having a structural modeling language of its own in which you specify the model. Along with the model, constraints are to be specified, saying that e.g. marriage is always between a man and wife, and such. Alloy then generates various instances of the model - e.g. 2 men, 2 women, 2 of them married and so forth..Now in Alloy, operations can be performed in which you can transform the present state of a model into new one. Say, a child is born. These operations need to be validated against invariants and alloy tries to generate a counter example if it exists.

There are number of ways of doing things in Alloy and theres no one right answer, so the professor of this course has a tough time to device the assignments which are easy to check for the course TA. And, thankfully, that makes them somewhat comprehendible ;)

Sometimes it really takes long time to generate instances. It really does...

2 comments so far.

  1. Parag 11:02 PM, March 12, 2006
    is the last line a pun intended, or you dont know what i am talking about ? :P
  2. AG 9:46 AM, March 13, 2006
    No pun intended! :)

Something to say?