This book began as a series of lecture notes for a course called Introduc tion to Adaptive Systems which I developed for undergraduate Computing Science majors at the University of Alberta and first taught in 1973. The objective of the course has been threefold: (l) to expose undergraduate computer scientists to a variety of subjects in the theory and application of computation, subjects which are too often postponed to the graduate level or never taught at all; (2) to provide undergraduates with a background sufficient to make them effective participants in graduate level courses in Automata...

This volume presents a programming model, similar to object-oriented programming, that imposes a strict discipline on the form of the constituent objects and interactions among them. Concurrency considerations have been eliminated from the model itself and are introduced only during implementation, thereby freeing programmers from dealing with concurrency explicitly. Moreover, the resulting software designs are typically more modular and easier to analyze than the more traditional ones. Numerous examples illustrate various aspects of the model and reveal that a few simple, integrated features...

The idea for this book was conceived over the second bottle of Villa Maria's Caber net Medot '89, at the dinner of the Australasian Combinatorics Conference held at Palmerston North, New Zealand in December 1990, where the authors first met and discovered they had a number of interests in common. Initially, we embarked on a small project to try to formulate reductions to address the apparent parame terized intractability of DOMINATING SET, and to introduce a structure in which to frame our answers. Having spent several months trying to get the definitions for the reductions right (they now...

A mathematical and logical foundation for the specification and development of interactive systems based on a model that describes systems in terms of their input/output behavior. Based on this model, the authors build a basic method, called FOCUS, that enables interactive systems to be described by characterizing their histories of message interaction. The book progresses from an introduction and guided tour of FOCUS through streams, specifications and their properties, and behavioral, interface, and conditional refinements.

From the reviews: "This book offers a coherent treatment, at the graduate textbook level, of the field that has come to be known in the last decade or so as computational geometry. ... ... The book is well organized and lucidly written; a timely contribution by two founders of the field. It clearly demonstrates that computational geometry in the plane is now a fairly well-understood branch of computer science and mathematics. It also points the way to the solution of the more challenging problems in dimensions higher than two." #Mathematical Reviews#1 ..". This remarkable book...

Since the summer of 1973, when I became a Burroughs Research Fellow, my life has been very different from what it had been before. The daily routine changed: instead of going to the University each day, where I used to spend most of my time in the company of others, I now went there only one day a week and was most of the time -that is, when not travelling - alone in my study. In my solitude, mail and the written word in general became more and more important. The circumstance that my employer and I had the Atlantic Ocean between us was a further incentive to keep a fairly complete record of...

This book develops a theory of formal power series in noncommuting variables, the main emphasis being on results applicable to automata and formal language theory. This theory was initiated around 196O-apart from some scattered work done earlier in connection with free groups-by M. P. Schutzenberger to whom also belong some of the main results. So far there is no book in existence concerning this theory. This lack has had the unfortunate effect that formal power series have not been known and used by theoretical computer scientists to the extent they in our estimation should have been. As...

This volume is being published for two reasons. The first is to present a collection of previously published articles on the subject of programming methodology that have helped define the field and give it direction. It is hoped that the scientist in the field will find the volume useful as a reference, while the scientist in neighboring fields will find it useful in seriously acquainting himself with important ideas in programming methodology. The advanced student can also study it-either in a course or by himself -in order to learn significant material that may not appear in texts for some...

There are several theories of programming. The first usable theory, often called "Hoare's Logic," is still probably the most widely known. In it, a specification is a pair of predicates: a precondition and postcondition (these and all technical terms will be defined in due course). Another popular and closely related theory by Dijkstra uses the weakest precondition predicate transformer, which is a function from programs and postconditions to preconditions. lones's Vienna Development Method has been used to advantage in some industries; in it, a specification is a pair of predicates (as in...