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Re: [tlaplus] Excessively long run time - How to reduce the number of states?



Hello,

I'm assuming that your module has CONSTANT declarations for the sets of bins and players. When you define your model that you give to TLC to check, choose "set of model values" for the bins (e.g., name them {b1,b2,b3,b4,b5}), and tick the checkbox "symmetry set".

Observe that it's the user's responsibility to ensure that the specification is indeed symmetric in the parameters instantiated by symmetry sets. As long as your bins only occur in quantified formulas, and in particular, you don't use an _expression_ such as

   CHOOSE b \in Bin : ...

to identify a particular bin, you should be on the safe side. You may also be able to declare players as a symmetry set in addition to the bins.

Hope this helps,
Stephan


On 3 Sep 2017, at 11:01, Alon Be <alo...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi everyone,
I'm really new to TLA+ and TLC, so forgive me if this is a silly question:

I have a model resembling the binpacking problem: I have 5 players P = {p1, p2, ..., p5} and 5 bins {b1, b2, ... , b5}.

Each bin contains some subset of P (initally the empty set).
In each round, the next player is chosen according to some rule, and the player chosen can add himself or remove itself from one of the bins.

I'm using TLC to check for some invariant (for example, whether at any time in the run, there exists a player who is exclusive in 3 bins - in other words, if there are 3 bins containing the same player and only him).
I have some more complex invariants as well, but I'd like to first understand the solution given the above simpler invariant.

In the most general form (if the next player was chosen uniformly), each bin has 2^5 = 25 options, and there are 5 bins so we have 2^25 ~ 32 million options.
The run takes far too long to complete on 32 cores.
(granted, the rules for choosing the next player are complex).

However, I want to "abuse" the fact that the 'name' of the bin isn't interesting to me.
I don't care if the current state is: [ b1 = {p1, p2} | b2 = {p1} | b3, b4, b5 = empty ]
Or if it is: [b1 = empty | b2 = {p1, p2} | b3,b4 = empty | b5 = {p1} ]

These are equivalent to me and thus I can skip checking many states.

I read the section of symmetry sets, as it sounded similar, but didn't come up with an idea of how to use this.

I'd appreciate any help,
Thanks a lot!

Alon

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