Verification has become one of the major bottlenecks in today’s circuit and system design. Up to 80% of the overall design costs are due to checking the correctness. Formal verification based on Bounded Model Checking (BMC) is a very powerful method that allows to prove the correctness of a device. In BMC the circuits behavior is considered over a finite time interval, but for the user it is of...

When we learn how to throw darts we adjust how we throw based on where the darts stick. Much of skill learning is computationally similar in that we learn using feedback obtained after the completion of individual actions. We can formalize such tasks as a search problem; among the set of all possible actions, find the action that leads to the highest reward. In such cases our actions have two o...

I this paper, we develop a practical and flexible framework for evaluating sequential exploration strategies in the case where the exploration prospects are dependent. Our interest in this problem was motivated by an oil exploration problem, and our approach begins with marginal assessments for each prospect (e.g., what is the probability that the well is wet?) and pairwise assessments of the d...

This paper was motivated by the problem of developing an optimal strategy for exploring a large oil and gas field in the North Sea. Where should we drill first? Where do we drill next? The problem resembles a classical multiarmed bandit problem, but probabilistic dependence plays a key role: outcomes at drilled sites reveal information about neighboring targets. Good exploration strategies will...

We study how to improve sequential single-item auctions that assign targets to robots for exploration tasks such as environmental clean-up, space-exploration, and search and rescue missions. We exploit the insight that the resulting travel distances are small if the bidding and winner-determination rules are designed to result in hillclimbing, namely to assign an additional target to a robot in...

In geochemical exploration, there are various techniques such as univariate and multivariate statistical methods available for recognition of anomalous areas. Univariate techniques are usually utilized to estimate the threshold value, which is the smallest quantity among the values representing the anomalous areas. In this work, a combination of the Sequential Gaussian Simulation (SGS) and Gap ...

This report consists of two separate parts, essentially two oversized footnotes to the article “Sequential Abstract State Machines Capture Sequential Algorithms” by Yuri Gurevich. In Chapter I, Yuri Gurevich and Tatiana Yavorskaya present and study a more abstract version of the bounded exploration postulate. In Chapter II, Tatiana Yavorskaya gives a complete form of the characterization, sketc...