PIMS Distinguished Chair lecture

Lecture 1:
Date: Tuesday, 29 July
Time: 10:30-12:30

Lecture 2:
Date: Thursday, 31 July
Time: 2:30-4:30

Place (both lectures): EAA 1100 (East Academic Annex, Just North of B-lot by pedestrian stop-light)

Topic: "The Theory of Abstract State Machines"

Speaker: Yuri Gurevich, Microsoft Research (2003 PIMS and SFU Distinguished Chair)

Abstract:
This is the second part of the series of lectures on abstract state machines. In the first part, in April 2003, I described the ASM project as a whole, from the original foundational motivation to current industrial applications. The second part is devoted to the ASM theory. The main part of it will be the formalization of the notion of sequential algorithms and the proof of the following theorem: Every sequential algorithm is behaviorally identical to some sequential ASM (and every sequential ASM is a sequential algorithm). A couple of running examples should allow us to understand the ideas. In the remaining time, we address various other questions (which may be driven by the audience) like the ASM background, the analog of the theorem above for the parallel algorithms and so on.