What I've been doing

[Patrick Premont]

Hello,

  I haven't been active on the list for quite a while, but I finally
have a little something to contribute. I've finished my Master's
thesis at the University of Toronto. I've said before that its subject
was related to TUNES. Well, it is, but it was not designed as a
contribution to TUNES. 

It's a comparison of two logical formalisms to represent actions and
their effect. One is from knowledge representation in AI and another
from formal programming methods.  I compare and unify the two
formalisms. You can find the thesis at <http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~premont>
It will probably be difficult to understand without consulting the
references, but if you feel confident in logic you can give it a shot.

It does not provide a logical formalism that is sufficient for the
goals of TUNES: for one thing I didn't select a treatment for time and
concurrency. It does provides an understanding of how we build TUNES
by starting from logic: We can provide a way to logically represent
world phenomena, and from that define programming languages to
accommodate whatever needs we have. That's not an innovative
suggestion, but I think that's the way to go. If I have the time in
the future, I would like to settle on a sufficiently expressive
logical representation, implement that into a theorem prover, specify
logically how the computer works (at least with respect to a subset of
CPU instructions), and build up TUNES from there, proved correct from
the start.

Unfortunately doing this in my free time will be very difficult, so I
can't promise that I will. But I'll keep you informed of any attempts
I make, and I'll keep reading this list to know what you are doing.

I'm leaving the academic world now, I'm going to write computer games.
I haven't lost interest in theory, I just feel it's time to do
something provably productive with my life (proved through the
voluntary contributions of my future clients). And I love writing
games.

Feedback and discussions are most welcome.

Patrick Premont