Seed Software

I. Description

Seed is java software distributed as a jar file, which generates uniformly at random tree structures specified by the user using a grammar described in an XML file.

Seed was designed by Pierre-Cyrille Heam, from the University of Franche-Comté, and by Cyril Nicaud from the University of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée. It has been written by Cyril Nicaud.

II. Trying seed

• First download either the tar.gz file or the zip file, and uncompress it.
• Make sure you have Java 5 or better installed.
• In the main directory, try it with

  java -jar seed.jar LTL1.xml 10

  you should have an XML description of a tree on the standard output.
• If it does not work, try the version compiled with Java 5.0

  java -jar seed_java5.jar LTL1.xml 10

III. Using seed

• To use seed on a description file named 'filename.xml' to generate k random objects of size n, use the following command:

  java -jar seed.jar filename.xml n k

• The output is an XML file whose root tag is "trees". Children of the root are k tags labelled by "tree" corresponding to the k random generations. The XML description of each tree is quite explicit as the XML structure encodes directly the tree structures.
• If there are quantified variables in the specification they appear at the beginning in the form

  <exists value="x"/>

• The standard output is used, so you can easily redirect the result in a file or in a program using. For instance, to write the output in random.xml use:

  java -jar seed.jar filename.xml n k > random.xml

• Changing k into -count gives the exact number of distinct objects of size n statisfying the specification. For instance:

  java -jar seed.jar LTL1.xml 20 -count

  Indicates that there are 30,330,559,552,144 such LTL formulas.
• Changing k into -text generates one object that is written as a one line text. It is mainly used to verify if the given specification behave as intended. For instance

  java -jar seed.jar LTL1.xml 20 -text

  Could output

  next(neg((a or (neg(b) until (neg((b until a)) or next(next((c or (a or next(a))))))))))

IV. Writting a specification