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Stochastic processes as concurrent constraint programs

Published: 01 January 1999 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes a stochastic concurrent constraint language for the description and programming of concurrent probabilistic systems. The language can be viewed both as a calculus for describing and reasoning about stochastic processes and as an executable language for simulating stochastic processes. In this language programs encode probability distributions over (potentially infinite) sets of objects. We illustrate the subtleties that arise from the interaction of constraints, random choice and recursion. We describe operational semantics of these programs (programs are run by sampling random choices), denotational semantics of programs (based on labeled transition systems and weak probabilistic bisimulation), and prove soundness theorems. We show that Probabilistic CC is conservative over CC, thus justifying the design of Probabilistic CC. We use the semantic study to illustrate a novel use of probability to analyze a problem stated without reference to probability, namely the problem of indeterminacy in synchronous programs.

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cover image ACM Conferences
POPL '99: Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
January 1999
324 pages
ISBN:1581130953
DOI:10.1145/292540
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 January 1999

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POPL99: Symposium on Prinicples of Programming Languages 1999
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