Next Formal Methods Seminar will take place on Friday, October 19th at 2pm in room B013.

Fabian Reiter (LSV, Cachan) will give a presentation entitled “Descriptive distributed complexity”

Abstract: This talk connects two classical areas of theoretical computer science: descriptive complexity and distributed computing. The former is a branch of computational complexity theory that characterizes complexity classes in terms of equivalent logical formalisms. The latter studies algorithms that run in networks of interconnected processors.

Although an active field of research since the late 1970s, distributed computing is still lacking the analogue of a complexity theory. One reason for this may be the large number of distinct models of distributed computation, which make it rather difficult to develop a unified formal framework. In my talk, I will outline how the descriptive approach, i.e., connections to logic, could be helpful in this regard.