# Minimizing random Boolean expressions

The previous post looked at all Boolean expressions on three or four variables and how much they can be simplified. The number of Boolean expressions on n variables is

and so the possibilities explode as n increases. We could do n = 3 and 4, but 5 would be a lot of work, and 6 is out of the question.

So we do what we always do when a space is too big to explore exhaustively: we explore at random.

The Python module we’ve been using, qm, specifies a function of n Boolean variables in terms of the set of product terms on which the function evaluates to 1. These product terms can be encoded as integers, and so a Boolean function of n variables corresponds to a subset of the integers 0 through 2n – 1.

We can generate a subset of these numbers by generating a random mask consisting of 0s and 1s, and keeping the numbers where the mask value is 1. We could do this with code like the following.

     N= 2**n
x = np.arange(N)


There’s a small problem with this approach: the set ones always contains 0. We want it to contain 0 if and only if the 0th mask value is a 1.

The following code generates a Boolean expression on n variables, simplifies it, and returns the length of the simplified expression [1].

    def random_sample(n):
N = 2**n
x = np.arange(N)
ones.remove(0)
return len(qm(ones=ones, dc={}))


We can create several random samples and make a histogram with the following code.

    def histogram(n, reps):
counts = np.zeros(2**n+1, dtype=int)
for _ in range(reps):
counts[random_sample(n)] += 1
return counts


The data in the following graph comes from calling histogram(5, 1000).

Note that the length of the random expressions is distributed symmetrically around 16 (half of 25). So minimization turns a distribution centered around 16 into a distribution centered around 8.

The code is slow because the Quine-McCluskey algorithm is slow, and our Python implementation of the algorithm isn’t as fast as it could be. But Boolean minimization is an NP problem, so no exact algorithm is going to scale well. To get faster results, we could switch to something like the Expresso Heuristic Logic Minimizer, which often gets close to a minimum expression.

***

[1] The code above will fail if the set of terms where the function is 1 is empty. However this is extremely unlikely: we’d expect it to happen once in every 2^(2^n) times and so when n = 5 this is less than one time in four billion. The fully correct approach would be to call qm with zeros=x when ones is empty.

# How much can Boolean expressions be simplified?

In the previous post we looked at how to minimize Boolean expressions using a Python module qm. In this post we’d like to look at how much the minimization process shortens expressions.

Witn n Boolean variables, you can create 2^n terms that are a product of distinct variables. You can specify a Boolean function by specifying the subset of such terms on which it takes the value 1, and so there are 2^(2^n) Boolean functions on n variables. For very small values of n we can minimize every possible Boolean function.

To do this, we need a way to iterate through the power set (set of all subsets) of the integers up to 2^n. Here’s a function to do that, borrowed from itertools recipes.

    from itertools import chain, combinations
def powerset(iterable):
xs = list(iterable)
return chain.from_iterable(
combinations(xs, n) for n in range(len(xs) + 1))


Next, we use this code to run all Boolean functions on 3 variables through the minimizer. We use a matrix to keep track of how long the input expressions are and how long the minimized expressions are.

    from numpy import zeros
from qm import q

n = 3
N = 2**n
tally = zeros((N,N), dtype=int)
for p in powerset(range(N)):
if not p:
continue # qm can't take an empty set
i = len(p)
j = len(qm(ones=p, dc={}))
tally[i-1, j-1] += 1


Here’s a table summarizing the results [1].

The first column gives the number of product terms in the input expression and the subsequent columns give the number of product terms in the output expressions.

For example, of the expressions of length 2, there were 12 that could be reduced to expressions of length 1 but the remaining 16 could not be reduced. (There are 28 possible input expressions of length 2 because there are 28 ways to choose 2 items from a set of 8 things.)

There are no nonzero values above the main diagonal, i.e. no expression got longer in the process of minimization. Of course that’s to be expected, but it’s reassuring that nothing went obviously wrong.

We can repeat this exercise for expressions in 4 variables by setting n = 4 in the code above. This gives the following results.

We quickly run into a wall as n increases. Not only does the Quine-McCluskey algorithm take about twice as long every time we add a new variable, the number of possible Boolean functions grows even faster. There were 2^(2^3) = 256 possibilities to explore when n = 3, and 2^(2^4) = 65,536 when n = 4.

If we want to explore all Boolean functions on five variables, we need to look at 2^(2^5) = 4,294,967,296 possibilities. I estimate this would take over a year on my laptop. The qm module could be made more efficient, and in fact someone has done that. But even if you made the code a billion times faster, six variables would still be out of the question.

To explore functions of more variables, we need to switch from exhaustive enumeration to random sampling. I may do that in a future post. (Update: I did.)

***

[1] The raw data for the tables presented as images is available here.

# Minimizing boolean expressions

This post will look at how to take an expression for a Boolean function and look for a simpler expression that corresponds to the same function. We’ll show how to use a Python implementation of the Quine-McCluskey algorithm.

## Notation

We will write AND like multiplication, OR like addition, and use primes for negation. For example,

wx + z

denotes

(w AND x) OR (NOT z).

## Minimizing expressions

You may notice that the expression

wxz + wxz

can be simplified to wz, for example, but it’s not feasible to simplify complicated expressions without a systematic approach.

One such approach is the Quine-McCluskey algorithm. Its run time increases exponentially with the problem size, but for a small number of terms it’s quick enough [1]. We’ll show how to use the Python module qm which implements the algorithm.

## Specifying functions

How are you going to pass a Boolean expression to a Python function? You could pass it an expression as a string and expect the function to parse the string, but then you’d have to specify the grammar of the little language you’ve created. Or you could pass in an actual Python function, which is more work than necessary, especially if you’re going to be passing in a lot of expressions.

A simpler way is pass in the set of places where the function evaluates to 1, encoded as numbers.

For example, suppose your function is

wxyz + wxyz

This function evaluates to 1 when either the first term evaluates to 1 or the second term evaluates to 1. That is, when either

(w, x, y, z) = (1, 1, 0, 1)

or

(w, x, y, z) = (0, 1, 1, 0).

Interpreting the left sides as binary numbers, you could specify the expression with the set {13, 6} which describes where the function is 1.

If you prefer, you could express your numbers in binary to make the correspondence to terms more explicit, i.e. {0b1101,0b110}.

## Using qm

One more thing before we use qm: your Boolean expression might not be fully specified. Maybe you want it to be 1 on some values, 0 on others, and you don’t care what it equals on the rest.

The qm module lets you specify these with arguments ones, zeroes, and dc. If you specify two out of these three sets, qm will infer the third one.

For example, in the code below

    from qm import qm
print(qm(ones={0b111, 0b110, 0b1101}, dc={}))


we’re asking qm to minimize the expression

xyz + xyz‘ + wxyz.

Since the don’t-care set is empty, we’re saying our function equals 0 everywhere we haven’t said that it equals 1. The function prints

    ['1101', '011X']

which corresponds to

wxyz + wxy,

the X meaning that the fourth variable, z, is not part of the second term.

Note that the minimized expression is not unique: we could tell by inspection that

xyz + xyz‘ + wxyz.

could be reduced to

xy + wxyz.

Also, our code defines a minimum expression to be one with the fewest sums. Both simplifications in this example have two sums. But xy + wxyz is simpler than wxyz + wxy in the sense of having one less term, so there’s room for improvement, or at least discussion, as to how to quantify the complexity of an expression.

In the next post I use qm to explore how much minimization reduces the size of Boolean expressions.

***

[1] The Boolean expression minimization problem is in NP, and so no known algorithm that always produces an exact answer will scale well. But there are heuristic algorithms like Espresso and its variations that usually provide optimal or near-optimal results.

# Rotating symbols in LaTeX

Linear logic uses an unusual symbol, an ampersand rotated 180 degrees, for multiplicative disjunction.

The symbol is U+214B in Unicode.

I was looking into how to produce this character in LaTeX when I found that the package cmll has two commands that produce this character, one semantic and one descriptive: \parr and \invamp [1].

This got me to wondering how you might create a symbol like the one above if there wasn’t one built into a package. You can do that by using the graphicx package and the \rotatebox command. Here’s how you could roll your own par operator:

    \rotatebox[origin=c]{180}{\&}

There’s a backslash in front of the & because it’s a special character in LaTeX. If you wanted to rotate a K, for example, there would be no need for a backslash.

The \rotatebox command can rotate any number of degrees, and so you could rotate an ampersand 30° with

    \rotatebox[origin=c]{30}{\&}

to produce a tilted ampersand.

## Related posts

[1] The name \parr comes from the fact that the operator is sometimes pronounced “par” in linear logic. (It’s not simply \par because LaTeX already has a command \par for inserting a paragraph break.)

The name \invamp is short for “inverse ampersand.” Note however that the symbol is not an inverted ampersand in the sense of being a reflection; it is an ampersand rotated 180°.

# Following an idea to its logical conclusion

Following an idea to its logical conclusion might be extrapolating a model beyond its valid range.

Suppose you have a football field with area A. If you make two parallel sides twice as long, then the area will be 2A. If you double the length of the sides again, the area will be 4A. Following this reason to its logical conclusion, you could double the length of the sides as many times as you wish, say 15 times, and each time the area doubles.

Except that’s not true. By the time you’ve doubled the length of the sides 15 times, you have a shape so big that it is far from being a rectangle. The fact that Earth is round matters a lot for figure that big.

Euclidean geometry models our world really well for rectangles the size of a football field, or even rectangles the size of Kansas. But eventually it breaks down. If the top extends to the north pole, your rectangle becomes a spherical triangle.

The problem in this example isn’t logic; it’s geometry. If you double the length of the sides of a Euclidean rectangle 15 times, you do double the area 15 times. A football field is not exactly a Euclidean rectangle, though it’s close enough for all practical purposes. Even Kansas is a Euclidean rectangle for most practical purposes. But a figure on the surface of the earth with sides thousands of miles long is definitely not Euclidean.

Models are based on experience with data within some range. The surprising thing about Newtonian physics is not that it breaks down at a subatomic scale and at a cosmic scale. The surprising thing is that it is usually adequate for everything in between.

Most models do not scale up or down over anywhere near as many orders of magnitude as Euclidean geometry or Newtonian physics. If a dose-response curve, for example, is linear for based on observations in the range of 10 to 100 milligrams, nobody in his right mind would expect the curve to remain linear for doses up to a kilogram. It wouldn’t be surprising to find out that linearity breaks down before you get to 200 milligrams.

“Any sufficiently advanced logic is indistinguishable from stupidity.” — Alex Tabarrok

# Curry-Howard-Lambek correspondence

Curry-Howard-Lambek is a set of correspondences between logic, programming, and category theory. You may have heard of the slogan proofs-as-programs or propositions-as-types. These refer to the Curry-Howard correspondence between mathematical proofs and programs. Lambek’s name is appended to the Curry-Howard correspondence to represent connections to category theory.

The term Curry-Howard isomorphism is often used but is an overstatement. Logic and programming are not isomorphic, nor is either isomorphic to category theory.

You’ll also hear the term computational trinitarianism. That may be appropriate because logic, programming, and category theory share common attributes without being identical.

The relations between logic, programming, and categories are more than analogies, but less than isomorphisms.

There are formal correspondences between parts of each theory. And aside from these rigorous connections, there is also a heuristic that something interesting in one area is likely to have an interesting counterpart in the other areas. In that sense Curry-Howard-Lambek is similar to the Langlands program relating number theory and geometry, a set of theorems and conjectures as well as a sort of philosophy.

# Logic and applications Twitter account

I stopped posting to the @FormalFact Twitter account last July, but I didn’t deactivate the account. Now I’m going to restart it.

Unlike my other Twitter accounts, I don’t plan to have a regular posting schedule. I may not post often. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve changed the account name from @FormalFact to @LogicPractice. The “formal” part of the original name referred to formal theorem proving, the initial focus of the account. The new name reflects a focus on logic more generally, and practical applications of logic that are less laborious than formal theorem proving.

# Modal and temporal logic for computer security

In the previous post, I mentioned that modal logic has a lot of interpretations and a lot of axiom systems. It can also have a lot of operators. This post will look at Security Logic, a modal logic for security applications based on a seminal paper by Glasgow et al [1]. It illustrates how modal and temporal logic can be applied to computer security, and it illustrates how a logic system can have a large number of operators and axioms.

## Knowledge axioms

Security Logic starts with operators Ki that extend the box operator □. For a proposition p, Ki p is interpreted as saying that the ith agent knows p to be true. Glasgow et al chose the following axioms for inference regarding Ki.

Axiom K1:   Ki φ → φ
Axiom K2:   Ki(φ → ψ) → (Ki φ → Ki ψ)
Axiom K3:   Ki φ → Ki Ki φ
Axiom K4:   ¬ Ki φ → Ki( ¬ Ki φ)

These can be interpreted as follows.

If you know something to be true, it’s true.
If you know one thing implies another, then knowing the first lets you know the other.
If you know something, you know that you know it.
If you don’t know something, you know that you don’t know it.

This is not to claim that these propositions are universal metaphysical truths, only modeling assumptions. It may be possible, for example, to know something without knowing that you know it, but that’s a subtle matter excluded from this model.

## Temporal logic axioms

Temporal logic is modal logic with operators interpreted as applying to propositions over time. Glasgow et al introduce three temporal operators: ∀□, ∀◇, and  ∃□. Note that each of these is a single operator; there is no box or diamond operator in Security Logic.

∀□p means that p always holds, ∀◇p means that p eventually holds, and ∃□p means that p sometimes holds.

The ∃□ and ∀□ operators are dual in the same sense that the basic modal operators □ and ◇ are dual:

∃□p ↔ ¬ ∀□ ¬p
∀□p ↔ ¬ ∃□ ¬p

Security Logic not give axioms for ∃□ because its behavior is determined by the axioms for ∀□.

The three temporal logic axioms for Security Logic are as follows.

Axiom T1:  φ → ∀◇φ
Axiom T2:  ∀□(φ → ψ) → (∀□φ → ∀□ψ)
Axiom T3:  ∀□φ → ∀□ ∀□φ

These can be interpreted as follows.

If a proposition holds, it eventually holds.
If its always the case that one proposition implies another, then if the former always holds then the latter always holds.
If something always holds, then it always always holds.

## Obligation and Permission

Finally, Security Logic introduces modal operators O and P for obligation and permission.

Obligation and permission are dual, just as necessity and possibility are dual and the always and sometimes operators are dual.

Op ↔ ¬ P ¬p
Pp ↔ ¬ O ¬p

When obligation and permission are combined with knowledge, Security Logic introduces the following abbreviations.

Oi = OKi
Pi = PKi

## Axioms for Security Logic

The complete axioms for Security Logic are the four knowledge axioms above, the three temporal axioms above, and the five additional axioms below.

Axiom SL1:   Pi φ for all propositional tautologies φ.
Axiom SL2:  Pi φ → φ
Axiom SL3:  (Pi φ ∧ Pi ψ) ↔ Pi (φ ∧ ψ)
Axiom SL4:  Pi φ → Pi (φ ∨ ψ)
Axiom SL5:  Oi φ → Pi φ

These can be interpreted as follows.

You are permitted to know all tautologies.
Whatever is permitted must be true.
Permission holds through conjunction and disjunction.
Whatever is obligatory must be permissible.

## Related posts

[1] Janice Glasgow, Glenn MacEwen, and Prakash Panangaden. A Logic for Reasoning About Security. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Vol 10 No 3, August 1992, pp 226–264.

# Typesetting modal logic

Modal logic extends propositional logic with two new operators, □ (“box”) and ◇ (“diamond”). There are many interpretations of these two symbols, the most common being necessity and possibility respectively. That is, □p means the proposition p is necessary, and ◇p means that p is possible. Another interpretation is using the symbols to represent things a person knows to be true and things that may be true as far as that person knows.

There are also many axiom systems for inference concerning these operators. For example, some axiom systems include the rule

and some do not. If you interpret □ as saying a proposition is provable, this axiom says whatever is provable is provably provable, which makes sense. But if you take □ to be a statement about what an agent knows, you may not want to say that if an agent knows something, it knows that it knows it.

See the next post for an example of applying logic to security, a logic with lots of modal operators and axioms. But for now, we’ll focus on how to typeset the box and diamond operators.

## LaTeX

In LaTeX, the most obvious commands would be \box and \diamond, but that doesn’t work. There is no \box command, though there is a \square command. And although there is a \diamond command, it produces a symbol much smaller than \square and so the two look odd together. The two operators are dual in the sense that

and so they should have symbols of similar size. A better approach is to use \Box and \Diamond. Those were used in the displayed equations above. These symbols are in the amsfonts package.

## Unicode

There are many box-like and diamond-like symbols in Unicode. It seems reasonable to use U+25A1 for box and U+25C7 for diamond. I don’t know of any more semantically appropriate characters. There are no Unicode characters with “modal” in their name, for example.

## HTML

You can always insert Unicode characters into HTML by using &#x, followed by the hexadecimal value of the codepoint, followed by a semicolon. For example, I typed &#x25a1; and &#x25c7; to enter the box and diamond symbols above.

If you want to stick to HTML entities because they’re easier to remember, you’re mostly out of luck. There is no HTML entity for the box operator. There is an entity &loz; for “lozenge,” the typographical term for a diamond. This HTML entity corresponds to U+25CA and is smaller than U+25c7 recommended above. As discussed in the context of LaTeX, you want the box and diamond operators to have a similar size.

# Automated theorem proving

When I first heard of automated theorem proving, I imagined computers being programmed to search for mathematical theorems interesting to a wide audience. Maybe that’s what a few of the pioneers in the area had in mind too, but that’s not how things developed.

The biggest uses for automated theorem proving have been highly specialized applications, not mathematically interesting theorems. Computer chip manufacturers use formal methods to verify that given certain inputs their chips produce certain outputs. Compiler writers use formal methods to verify that their software does the right thing. A theorem saying your product behaves correctly is very valuable to you and your customers, but nobody else. These aren’t the kinds of theorems that anyone would cite the way they might site the Pythagorean theorem. Nobody would ever say “And therefore, by the theorem showing that this particular pacemaker will not fall into certain error modes, I now prove this result unrelated to pacemakers.”

Automated theorem provers are important in these highly specialized applications in part because the results are of such limited interest. For every theorem of wide mathematical interest, there are a large number of mathematicians who are searching for a proof or who are willing to scrutinize a proposed proof. A theorem saying that a piece of electronics performs correctly appeals to only the tiniest audience, and yet is probably much easier (for a computer) to prove.

The term “automated theorem proving” is overloaded to mean a couple things. It’s used broadly to include any use of computing in proving theorems, and it’s used more narrowly to mean software that searches for proofs or even new theorems. Most theorem provers in the broad sense are not automated theorem provers in the more narrow sense but rather proof assistants. They verify proofs rather than discover them. (There’s some gray zone. They may search on a small scale, looking for a way to prove a minor narrow result, but not search for the entire proof to a big theorem.) There have been computer-verified proofs of important mathematical theorems, such as the Feit-Thompson theorem from group theory, but I’m not aware of any generally interesting discoveries that have come out of a theorem prover.

Related post: Formal methods let you explore the corners