Interactive synthesis of process flowcharts

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of synthesizing certain type of flowcharts, called process flowcharts. A process flowchart is a flowchart which describes a process of some routine work such as a procedure of creating executable programs. Our synthesis algorithm gets information on a process flowchart through interactions with the user; the algorithm successively predicts a statement and the user examine whether the prediction is exactly what the user expects or not and, if necessary, the user provides the algorithm with counterexamples. Our algorithm identifies a subclass of process flowcharts, called the class of historically deterministic process flowcharts, in the limit. It creates any conjecture in a polynomial time of the size of input examples.