Result: Synthesising Programs with Non-trivial Constants
Abate, A, Barbosa, H, Barrett, C, David, C, Kesseli, P, Kroening, D, Polgreen, E, Reynolds, A & Tinelli, C 2023, ' Synthesising programs with non-trivial constants ', Journal of Automated Reasoning, vol. 67, no. 2, 19, pp. 1-25 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10817-023-09664-4
0168-7433
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Further Information
Program synthesis is the mechanised construction of software. One of the main difficulties is the efficient exploration of the very large solution space, and tools often require a user-provided syntactic restriction of the search space. While useful in general, such syntactic restrictions provide little help for the generation of programs that contain non-trivial constants, unless the user is able to provide the constants in advance. This is a fundamentally difficult task for state-of-the-art synthesisers. We propose a new approach to the synthesis of programs with non-trivial constants that combines the strengths of a counterexample-guided inductive synthesiser with those of a theory solver, exploring the solution space more efficiently without relying on user guidance. We call this approach CEGIS($$\mathcal {T}$$ T ), where $$\mathcal {T}$$ T is a first-order theory. We present two exemplars, one based on Fourier-Motzkin (FM) variable elimination and one based on first-order satisfiability. We demonstrate the practical value of CEGIS($$\mathcal {T}$$ T ) by automatically synthesising programs for a set of intricate benchmarks. Additionally, we present a case study where we integrate CEGIS($$\mathcal {T}$$ T ) within the mature synthesiser CVC4 and show that CEGIS($$\mathcal {T}$$ T ) improves CVC4’s results.