Multiverse Debugging

Multiverse debugging offers a powerful toolset for addressing the inherent complexity and non-determinism in concurrent systems. It opens new possibilities for developers and researchers to understand, analyze, optimize, and improve system reliability and performance.

The concept of the multiverse, though controversial in philosophy [1] and physics [2], has gained traction in psychology [3] and neurology [4], where multiverse analysis addresses the researcher’s degrees of freedom issue [5]. In mathematics, the multiverse framework is seen in foundational interpretations of set theory [6]. In engineering, Leslie Lamport’s Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA) [7] conceptualizes system specifications within an implicit underlying universe. This framework complements Edward Lee’s view on engineering models [8], where engineers are seen as creators of their design universes.

In computer science, the multiverse concept was first introduced in [10] to address challenges in debugging concurrent actor programs. Multiverse debugging proposes to explore all potential program behaviors, paralleling modal temporal logics and Kripke’s possible worlds interpretations [9]. The idea of multiverse debugging was extended to the formal analysis of behavioral specifications [11][12][13], where it served as a cohesive metaphor for integrating debugging and model-checking [11]. This integration enhances breakpoint expressivity [11] and facilitates interactive analysis of complex systems [13]. Early scalability concerns [10] were mitigated by M. Pasquier et al. in [12], who demonstrated that multiverse debugging could be optimized through the integration of a variety of under-approximation techniques [14].

References

[1] S. Friederich, Multiverse Theories: A Philosophical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

[2] John F. Donoghue. The multiverse and particle physics. Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, 66(Volume 66, 2016):1–21, 2016.

[3] Steegen, S., Tuerlinckx, F., Gelman, A., & Vanpaemel, W. (2016). Increasing Transparency Through a Multiverse Analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(5), 702-712. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616658637

[4] Clayson, Peter E. (2024-03-01). “Beyond single paradigms, pipelines, and outcomes: Embracing multiverse analyses in psychophysiology”. International Journal of Psychophysiology. 197: 112311. doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2024.112311. ISSN 0167-8760

[5] Wicherts, Jelte M.; Veldkamp, Coosje L. S.; Augusteijn, Hilde E. M.; Bakker, Marjan; van Aert, Robbie C. M.; van Assen, Marcel A. L. M. (2016). “Degrees of Freedom in Planning, Running, Analyzing, and Reporting Psychological Studies: A Checklist to Avoid p-Hacking”. Frontiers in Psychology. 7: 1832. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01832. PMC 5122713. PMID 27933012.

[6] D. Hamkins, “The Set-theoretic Multiverse,” The Review of Symbolic Logic, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 416–449, 2012. doi:10.1017/S1755020311000359

[7] Leslie Lamport. 1994. The temporal logic of actions. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 16, 3 (May 1994), 872–923. https://doi.org/10.1145/177492.177726

[8] Edward A. Lee. 2018. Modeling in engineering and science. Commun. ACM 62, 1 (January 2019), 35–36. https://doi.org/10.1145/3231590.

[9] Raymond D. Bradley, Norman Swartz, Possible Worlds – An Introduction to Logic and its Philosophy, Hackett Publishing (1979).

[10] Carmen Torres Lopez, Robbert Gurdeep Singh, Stefan Marr, Elisa Gonzalez Boix, and Christophe Scholliers. Multiverse Debugging: Non-Deterministic Debugging for Non-Deterministic Programs (Brave New Idea Paper). In 33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 134, pp. 27:1-27:30, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.27

[11] Matthias Pasquier, Ciprian Teodorov, Frédéric Jouault , Matthias Brun , Luka Le Roux. Temporal Breakpoints for Multiverse Debugging. Software Language Engineering 2023, Oct 2023, Lisbonne, Portugal.

[12] Matthias Pasquier, Ciprian Teodorov, Frédéric Jouault , Matthias Brun , Luka Le Roux. Practical multiverse debugging through user-defined reductions. MODELS ‘22: ACM/IEEE 25th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, Oct 2022, Montreal Quebec Canada, Canada. pp.87-97, ⟨10.1145/3550355.3552447⟩.

[13] Matthias Pasquier, Ciprian Teodorov, Frédéric Jouault , Matthias Brun , Loïc Lagadec. Debugging Paxos in the UML Multiverse. MODELS-C/MoDeVVa, Oct 2023, Västerås, Sweden.

[14] Radek Pelanek. Reduction and Abstraction Techniques for Model Checking. Ph.D. Thesis, Masaryk University, 2006.