The main barrier to automatic verification of concurrent systems is the huge amount of memory required to complete the verification task (state explosion). In this paper we present a probabilistic algorithm for automatic verification via model checking. Our algorithm trades space with time. In particular, when memory is full because of state explosion our algorithm does not give up verification. Instead it just proceeds at a lower speed and its results will only hold with some arbitrarily small error probability. Our preliminary experimental results show that by using our probabilistic algorithm we can typically save more than 30% of RAM with an average time penalty of about 100% w.r.t. a deterministic state space exploration with enough memory to complete the verification task. This is better than giving up the verification task because of lack of memory.

Terms finitely representing infinite sequences of finite first-order terms have received attention by several authors. In this paper, we consider the class of recurrent terms proposed by H. Chen and J. Hsiang, and we extend it to allow infinite terms. This extension helps in clarifying the relationships between matching and unification over the class of terms we consider, that we call iterative terms. In fact, it holds that if a term s matches a term t by a substitution Γ, then the limit of iterations of the matching Γ, if it exists, is a most general unifier of s and t. A crucial feature of iterative terms is the notion of maximally-folded normal form that allows for a comprehensive treatment of both finite and infinite iterative terms. In this setting, infinite terms can be simply characterized as limits of sequences of finite terms. For finite terms we positively settle an open problem of H. Chen and J. Hsiang on the number of most general unifiers for a pair of terms.