Channels ▼   2007 Turing Award Winners Announced  Edmund M.
Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis are the recipients
of the 2007 A.M. Turing Award for their work on an automated
method for finding design errors in computer hardware and
software.   Clarke, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University,
Emerson, of the University of Texas, Austin, and Joseph Sifakis
of the University of Grenoble, will share $250,000. The Turing
Award, presented annually by the Association for Computing
Machinery, is considered to be the most prestigious award in
computing. Often referred to as "the Nobel Prize of computing,"
it is named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing   Clarke
implemented the first Model Checker in 1982. It could analyze
all the possible states of a given circuit, but was limited to
relatively small designs -- much smaller than the systems being
built by computer manufacturers. In 1987, Clarke's graduate
student, Kenneth McMillan, realized that he could implement
Model Checking by a series of operat