The Association of Computing Machinery has awarded the $250,000 A.M Turing Prize to three men who created an automated way to find design errors in hardware or software.

The prize is shared between Edmund Clarke (Carnegie Mellon), E Allen Emerson (University of Texas at Austin) and Joseph Sifakis (University of Grenoble).

Often described as the Nobel prize for computing, the Turing prize got a boost in sponsorship last year from Google.

Model checking is a process of checking for mistakes by expressing a system as a logic formula. It was used to check the PCI bus specifications.

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