For the past two years the Software Management Research U nit at General Electric has been investigating several areas of human factors in software engineering with support from Engineering Psychology Programs of the Office of Naval Research. There have been two major thrusts in this research. The first thrust investigated the effects of several modern programming practices on programmer effici...

Genetic Programming (GP) has found various applications. Understanding this type of algorithm from a theoretical point of view is a challenging task. The first results on the computational complexity of GP have been obtained for problems with isolated program semantics. With this paper, we push forward the computational complexity analysis of GP on a problem with dependent program semantics. We...

this study examined the effects of task complexity on written narrative production under different task complexity conditions by efl learners at different proficiency levels. task complexity was manipulated along robinson’s (2001b) proposed task complexity dimension of here-and-now (simple) vs. there-and-then (complex) in. accordingly, three specific measures of the written narratives were targ...

Program verification covers a wide range of techniques, frameworks and tools, interested in proving various properties about real world programs. Beyond basic safety properties (e.g. memory safety), program verification can be used to establish full functional correctness, meaning that, for every input, the program always behaves as expected. Yet, full functional correctness does not capture al...

We study a class of program schemes, NPSB, in which, aside from basic assignments, nondeterministic guessing and while loops, we have access to arrays; but where these arrays are binary write-once in that they are initialized to ‘zero’ and can only ever be set to ‘one’. We show, amongst other results, that: NPSB can be realized as a vectorized Lindstr om logic; there are problems accepted by p...

We show that classical and quantum Kolmogorov complexity of binary strings agree up to an additive constant. Both complexities are defined as the minimal length of any (classical resp. quantum) computer program that outputs the corresponding string. It follows that quantum complexity is an extension of classical complexity to the domain of quantum states. This is true even if we allow a small p...

We propose a new order-theoretic characterisation of the class of polytime computable functions. To this avail we define the small polynomial path order ([Formula: see text] for short). This termination order entails a new syntactic method to analyse the innermost runtime complexity of term rewrite systems fully automatically: for any rewrite system compatible with [Formula: see text] that empl...

We show that classical and quantum Kolmogorov complexity of binary words agree up to an additive constant. Both complexities are defined as the minimal length of any (classical resp. quantum) computer program that outputs the corresponding word. It follows that quantum complexity is an extension of classical complexity to the domain of quantum states. This is true even if we allow a small proba...

The reliability of plagiarism detection systems, which try to identify similar programs in large populations, is critically dependent on the choice of program representation. Software metrics conventionally used as representations are described, and the limitations of metrics adapted from software complexity measures are outlined. An applicationspecific metric is proposed, one that represents t...

Focussing on the "McCabe family" of measures for the decision/logic structure of a program, leads to an evaluation of extensions to modularization, nesting and, potentially, to object-oriented program structures. A comparison of rated, operating and essential complexities of programs suggests two new metrics: 'inessential complexity" as a measure of unstructuredness and "product complexity" as ...