Concept
Computation tree logic
Overview
Computation tree logic (CTL) is a branching-time logic, meaning that its model of time is a tree-like structure in which the future is not determined; there are different paths in the future, any one of which might be an actual path that is realized. It is used in formal verification of software or hardware artifacts, typically by software applications known as model checkers, which determine if a given artifact possesses safety or liveness properties. For example, CTL can specify that when some initial condition is satisfied (e.g., all program variables are positive or no cars on a highway straddle two lanes), then all possible executions of a program avoid some undesirable condition (e.g., dividing a number by zero or two cars colliding on a highway). In this example, the safety property could be verified by a model checker that explores all possible transitions out of program states satisfying the initial condition and ensures that all such executions satisfy the property. Computation tree logic belongs to a class of temporal logics that includes linear temporal logic (LTL). Although there are properties expressible only in CTL and properties expressible only in LTL, all properties expressible in either logic can also be expressed in CTL*.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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This is nothing else than the necessity of abstract logic, which is the presupposition involved in the very fact of interrelated existence as disclosed in each immediate occasion of experience. The key to the pattern means this fact:—that from a select set of those general conditions, exemplified in any one and the same occasion, a pattern involving an infinite variety of other such conditions, also exemplified in…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
States what Computation tree logic is.
On the other hand an event-particle is defined so as to exhibit this character of being a route of approximation marked out by entities posited in sense-awareness. A definite event-particle is defined in reference to a definite punct in the following manner: Let the condition {sigma} mean the property of covering all the abstractive elements which are members of that punct; so that an abstractive set which satisfies…
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
States what Computation tree logic is.
To certain facts, certain facts always do, and, as we believe, will continue to, succeed. The invariable antecedent is termed the cause; the invariable consequent, the effect. And the universality of the law of causation consists in this, that every consequent is connected in this manner with some particular antecedent, or set of antecedents. Let the fact be what it may, if it has begun to exist, it was preceded by…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
States what Computation tree logic is.
Related ideas
- Formal language
- First-order logic
- Logical connective
- Mathematical logic
- Formal verification
- Truth
- Time
- Model checking
- Temporal logic
- Second-order logic
- Logical consequence
- Well-formed formula
- Atomic formula
- De Morgan's laws
- Context-free grammar
- Linear temporal logic
- CTL*
Place in the tradition
Part of Temporal logic.