The Verify Playground

 

Software plays an increasingly important role in a wide range of areas: government, finance, transportation, communication, commerce, entertainment, and even life and death. Errors in software can lead to catastrophic consequences, which is why the verification of computer programs is an essential part of ensuring their safety and reliability.

Verification is a process of mathematically proving that a computer program functions as intended using automated tools. It is a practice that is used in computer hardware design, software engineering, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, automated theorem proving, and blockchain and smart contracts.

The Verify Playground offers a variety of challenges to test and improve your verification skills in a hands-on, competitive environment. The playground combines traditional challenge tasks with new ones, and includes a special section for verification problems that require advanced programming languages or other non-traditional techniques.

Problems and challenges are randomized each year, and are usually a few weeks before the competition starts; we also ask teams to submit proposals for verification problems that may appear in the future. These proposals can range from the most interesting to the most difficult, so that participants can get a sense of the types of problems that are likely to be presented at a given competition.

In general, challenges that are less challenging tend to be presented early in a competition; the later a challenge appears, the more difficult it is. This could be due to the fact that the most experienced and ambitious teams have time to prepare for a challenge, and may be more likely to complete it correctly.

Another factor that influences 먹튀검증소 how easy it is to solve a challenge is its main algorithm; when a challenge’s main algorithm is recursive or the input is a mutable data structure, fewer teams complete a correct solution. This is because recursive algorithms are hard to reason about and recursive proofs can be challenging.

We also observe that the most complex challenge tasks are those that involve recursive algorithms or mutable data structures, such as task 2 (proving that the sequential and concurrent algorithms compute the same output). This is a result of how verification tools are typically designed: They often focus on verifying iterative algorithms and are not so good at handling naturally recursive ones.

A possible solution for this challenge in future events might be to design problems with parts that are suitable for different verification approaches, and thus encourage a broad range of verification approaches. However, we note that this is a more difficult design than simply writing one verification challenge that suits all kinds of tools and verification frameworks.