IDTS Interactive Diagnosis and Testing System for Prolog Programs

Researchers: Tibor Gyimóthy Ph.D; Zoltán Alexin

Ph.D Students: Gabriella Kókai; László Harmath

Overview

The IDT system is a debugging system for Prolog programs that combines Shapiro's Interactive Diagnosis Algorithm with CPM (Category Partition Method)

As suggested by Shapiro, an inductive learning process can be assisted by an algorithmic debugging phase. Algorithmic debugging is a semi-automatic technique where the user acts as an oracle who can answer queries concerning the intended meaning of the program on the abstract level of procedures. The central problem with the basic algorithm is the potentially large number of queries to the oracle. The IDT improves Shapiro's original scheme by integrating testing and (static) slicing with algorithmic debugging. This integrated technique is more effective than the basic one, in that the number of questions to the oracle is reduced. First, the oracle is not asked for verification of the results of a procedure call if they can be checked from a test database. And second, only such program execution paths are analyzed that may have affected the value of an incorrect output. The test database component of the system is based on the category partition testing method, and the slicing component applies techniques originally developed for attribute grammars.

References

Horváth, T., Gyimóthy, T., Alexin, Z., Kocsis F.:
Interactive Diagnosis and Testing of Logic Programs
in Proc. of the Third Finnish-Estonian-Hungarian Symposium on Programming Languages and Software Tools Kääriku, Estonia, (1993) pp 34-46
Paakki, J., Gyimóthy, T., Horváth, T.:
Effective Algorithic Debugging for Inductive Logic Programming
presented in the ILP94 Workshop, Bonn, Germany, (1994)
Kokai, G., Alexin, Z., Kocsis, F.:
The IDT System and its Application for Learning Prolog Programs
in Proc. of the Sixth International Conference on Atrificial Intelligence and Information-Control Systems of Robots, Smolenice Castle, Slovakia, Eds: Ivan Plender, Worlds Scientific (1994) 315-320
Alexin, Z., Gyimóthy, T., Kókai, G.:
IDT: Integrated System for Debugging and Testing Prolog Programs
in Proc. of the Fourth Symposium on Programming Languages and Software Tools (Eds: László Varga) Visegrád, (1995) 312-323
Kókai, G., Harmath, L., Gyimóthy, T.:
IDTS: a Tool for Debugging and Testing of Prolog Programs
LIRA'97, The 8th Conference on Logic and Computer Science, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia 1-4 September 1997, 103-110
Kókai, G., Harmath, L., Gyimóthy, T.:
Algorithmic Debugging and Testing of Prolog Programs
ICLP '97 The Fourteenth International Conference on Logic Programming, Eighth Workshop on Logic Programming Environments Leuven, Belgium, 8-12 July 1997, 14-21