Summer School on Games and Computation

[categories <cat-dist@mta.ca>]

Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 18:14:45 +0100
From: Samson Abramsky <samson@dcs.ed.ac.uk>


               MATHFIT SUMMERSCHOOL IN EDINBURGH

                    GAMES AND COMPUTATION
       Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science
                      JUNE 23-24 1997

The use of games to model various aspects of computation has been notably
successful over the past few years. In particular, two areas where there
has been rapid progress recently are: game semantics and its applications
to programming languages and logic; and the use of games in verifying
properties of concurrent processes.

Game semantics has been used to give the first syntax-independent
constructions of fully abstract models for functional languages such as
PCF and FPC (Abramsky,Jagadeesan and Malacaria, Hyland and Ong, Nickau,
McCusker), for
imperative languages such as Idealized Algol (Abramsky and McCusker), and
for languages with non-local control operators such as call-cc (Ong,
Laird). There are promising applications to object-oriented languages in
progress.

In the area of concurrency, games have been used to explicate
bisimulation and proof-search in the modal mu-calculus (Stirling). This has
been applied to the Edinburgh Concurrency Workbench by Perdita Stevens, and
has resulted in improvements to the efficiency of the implementation.

                           SPEAKERS

Samson Abramsky, Edinburgh University
Martin Hyland, Cambridge University
Perdita Stevens, Edinburgh University
Colin Stirling, Edinburgh University
Wolfgang Thomas, Christian-Albrechts University, Kiel

                            GRANTS
A small number of grants for the Summer School are available for PhD
students.

Further information and registration forms can be found at:

http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/cps/school.html



The Summer School is supported by the U.K. Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council and the London Mathematical Society.

Samson Abramsky and Colin Stirling