Abstract Machines

The book emphasizes the design of full-fledged, fully normalizing lambda calculus machinery, as opposed to the just weakly normalizing machines.

What can philosophy bring to the reading of Beckett? Combining intertextual analysis with a ‘schizoanalytic genealogy’ derived from the authors of L’Anti-Œdipe, Garin Dowd’s Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari offers an innovative response to this much debated question. The author focuses on zones of encounter and thresholds of engagement between Beckett’s writing and a range of philosophers (among them Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant) and philosophical concepts. Beckett’s writing impacts in a variety of ways on Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, and, in particular, resonates with Deleuze’s contributions to the history of philosophy (in books such as Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque), and his ‘critical and clinical’ approach to literature. Furthermore, the books co-written with Guattari, concerned as they are with the ‘molecularization’ of the discipline of philosophy in the name of ‘thinking otherwise’, reveal themselves in a new light when explored in conjunction with Beckett’s œuvre. With its arresting perspectives on a wide range of Beckett’s works, Abstract Machines will appeal to academics and postgraduate students interested in the philosophical aspects of his writing. Its engagement with alternative contributions to the question of Beckett and philosophy, including that of Alain Badiou, renders it a timely and provocative intervention in contemporary debates on the relationship between literature and philosophy, both within the field of Beckett studies and beyond.

The book emphasizes the design of full-fledged, fully normalizing lambda calculus machinery, as opposed to the just weakly normalizing machines.

The ASM 2000 workshop was held in the conference center of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) at Monte Verit a, Canton Ticino, March 19-24, 2000. The ASM formalism was proposed together with the thesis that it is suitable to model arbitrary computer systems on arbitrary abstraction levels. ASMs have been successfully used to analyze and specify various hardware and software systems including numerous computer languages. The aim of the workshop was to bring together domain-experts, using ASMs as a practical speci cation method, and theorists working with ASMs and related methods. In addition the workshop served as a forum on theoretical and practical topics that relate to ASMs in a broad sense. Three tutorials including hands-on experience with tools were organized by U. Gl ̈asser and G. del Castillo (on the topic \Specifying Concurrent Systems with ASMs"), H. Russ ̈ and N. Shankar (on the topic \A Tutorial Introduction to PVS"), M. Anlau , P.W. Kutter, and A. Pierantonio (on the topic \Developing Domain Speci c Languages"). In response to the organization committee’s call for papers, 30 papers were submitted, each of which was independently reviewed by four members of the program committee. This volume presents a selection of 12 of the refereed papers and two reports on industrial ASM application at Siemens AG and Microsoft Research, together with contributions based on the invited talks given by A.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference of Abstract State Machines, B and Z, ABZ 2008, held in London, UK, in September 2008. The conference simultaneously incorporated the 15th International ASM Workshop, the 17th International Conference of Z Users and the 8th International Conference on the B Method. The 44 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The conference fosters the cross-fertilization of three rigorous methods for the design and analysis of hardware and software systems - both in academia and industry - namely Abstract State Machines, B, and Z. Covering a wide range of research spanning from theoretical and methodological foundations to tool support and practical applications, the contributions are organized in topical sections on abstract state machines, B papers, Z papers, ABZ short papers, and the papers of the Verified Software Repository Network (VSR-net) workshop.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Abstract State Machines, B and Z, which took place in Orford, QC, Canada, in February 2010. The 26 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The book also contains two invited talks and abstracts of 18 short papers which address work in progress, industrial experience reports and tool descriptions. The papers cover recent advances in four equally rigorous methods for software and hardware development: abstract state machines (ASM), Alloy, B and Z. They share a common conceptual framework, centered around the notions of state and operation, and promote mathematical precision in the modeling, verification and construction of highly dependable systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Abstract State Machines, ASM 2003, held in Taormina, Italy in March 2003. The 16 revised full papers presented together with 8 invited papers and 12 abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers reflect the state of the art of the abstract state machine method for the design and analysis of complex software/hardware systems. Besides theoretical results and methodological progress, application in various fields are studied as well.