Realizable and Unrealizable Specifications of Reactive Systems

Abadi and I came upon the concept of realizability in [97]. Several other people independently came up with the idea at around the same time, including Wolper. Abadi and Wolper worked together to combine our results and his into a single paper. Abadi recollects that the section of the paper dealing with the general case was mostly ours, and Wolper mostly developed the finite case, including the algorithms. He remembers adopting the term “realizability” from realizability in intuitionistic logic, and thinking of the relation with infinite games after seeing an article about such games in descriptive set theory in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. As I recall, I wasn’t very involved in the writing of this paper.