Scalar outcomes suffice for finitary probabilistic testing

  • Authors:

  • Yuxin Deng;Rob van Glabbeek;Carroll Morgan;Chenyi Zhang

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Comp. Sci. and Eng., University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;School of Comp. Sci. and Eng., University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia and National ICT Australia, Sydney, Australia;School of Comp. Sci. and Eng., University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;School of Comp. Sci. and Eng., University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia and National ICT Australia, Sydney, Australia

  • Venue:
  • ESOP'07 Proceedings of the 16th European conference on Programming
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The question of equivalence has long vexed research in concurrency, leading to many different denotational- and bisimulation-based approaches; a breakthrough occurred with the insight that tests expressed within the concurrent framework itself, based on a special "success action", yield equivalences that make only inarguable distinctions. When probability was added, however, it seemed necessary to extend the testing framework beyond a direct probabilistic generalisation in order to remain useful. An attractive possibility was the extension to multiple success actions that yielded vectors of real-valued outcomes. Here we prove that such vectors are unnecessary when processes are finitary, that is finitely branching and finite-state: single scalar outcomes are just as powerful. Thus for finitary processes we can retain the original, simpler testing approach and its direct connections to other naturally scalar-valued phenomena.