alt Hacker NewsIs anyone working on applying these techniques to formal verification of software?
My limited understanding of Rust is that it applies a fixed set of rules to guarantee memory safety. The rules are somewhat simple and limiting, for ease of understanding and implementation, but also because of undecidability.
Programmers run into situations where they know that their code won't cause memory errors, but it doesn't follow the rules. Wouldn't it be cool if something like Aristotle was integrated into the compiler? Any code for which a proof of correctness could be written would pass/compile, without having to add more and more rules
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An issue with this approach is that it may not be robust. That is, you could run into a casr where a minor modification of your program is suddenly not provable anymore, even though it is still correct. The heuristic (AI or otherwise) has necessarily limits, and if your are close to the "edge" of its capabilities then a minor change could push it across.
If the proof is rooted in the programmer's understanding who can give proof hints to the prover then any modification of the program can then be accompanied with a modification of the hints, still allowing automatic proofs. But if the human has no clue then the automatic system can get stuck without the human having a chance to help it along.
Formal verification of program correctness is also (for obvious reasons) key to unlocking AI-driven synthesis (i.e. 'vibe' coding) of "correct" programs that will verifiably meet the given spec.
We are! We very recently announced some results on formally proving the correctness of programs: https://harmonic.fun/news#blog-post-verina-bench-sota
Formal methods are cool because, by contrast to tools like the borrow checker, you can prove some very "nonlocal" properties: this system does not deadlock, or it makes progress at least every N steps, etc.