Statements That Change with Time

Temporal reasoning is really useful. In order to talk about time, logicians have designed many different temporal logics, including CTL, ATL, CTL*, and LTL to name just a few. I’m going to describe the one I’m most familiar with, which is called computation tree logic, or CTL. CTL is designed for reasoning about very low-level computations in computer hardware where operations can modify persistent state, like hardware flags. CTL is a very simple logic, which really can’t say very much. In fact, CTL may seem unreasonably simple when you see it. But it’s really not; CTL is widely used for real-world practical applications.

CTL may be simple, but it’s a typical example of the way that you can look at time in ...

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