Frequently asked questions

Why the name IMITATOR?: IMITATOR is an acronym standing for Inverse Method for Inferring Time AbstracT behaviOR. It was chosen at the time when IMITATOR only implemented the inverse method. The person responsible for this acronym is Laurent Fribourg 🤓
Should I write "Imitator" or "IMITATOR"?: The official name is IMITATOR. In LaTeX, please use \textsf{IMITATOR}.
I would like to cite IMITATOR. What is the right publication to cite?: The latest "official" publication describing IMITATOR is the paper [Andre21] published at CAV 2021 and introducing IMITATOR 3.0. See our publications.
What is the license of IMITATOR?: IMITATOR is distributed under the GNU General Public License. In short, it is free to use (including for commercial purpose), to share, and modify, as long as the modifications are published under the same license.
Where is the user manual?: The latest user manual can be downloaded here. The downloading and installing instructions are available there.
Is there a graphical user interface (GUI)?: IMITATOR does not come natively with a GUI. It does however produces graphical outputs.
I have some troubles installing IMITATOR; who can I ask for help?: Note that, on all Linux-based systems, you don’t need to install, but simply to download and execute our static binaries. To compile from sources (optional!), carefully read the instructions. If your problem is still unsolved, you can just contact us.
Is IMITATOR available for Mac/Windows/Linux?: IMITATOR is natively available for Linux (we provide static binaries for any distribution without the need to install anything). For Mac and Windows, we recommend the new docker method, which is very simple. See the Download section.
I have some troubles to design a model with IMITATOR; who can I ask for help?: You can just contact us.
What text edition software do you recommend to edit IMITATOR models?: We are not aware of an environment supporting IMITATOR syntax highlighting natively; however, due to the strong similarity between the IMITATOR syntax and the OCaml syntax (at least for the comments style), we recommend (and use ourselves) the editor Kate, customized with the "Objective Caml" highlighting set by default for .imi files. Kate is available by default in KUbuntu, and can be installed very easily in other Linux distributions. In addition, Giuseppe Lipari prepared an Emacs mode, available here.
I would like to have a new feature in IMITATOR.: The best is to fill a feature request on GitHub (section Issues, then New Issue). Otherwise, if you do not have a GitHub account, you can just contact us. Of course, you can also implement yourself this feature, and use the pull request on GitHub, after which the development team will integrate your improvement in the main branch of IMITATOR.
I found a bug in IMITATOR. How can I report it to you?: We are very sorry about this. The best is to fill a bug report on GitHub (section Issues, then New Issue). Otherwise, if you do not have a GitHub account, you can just contact us.
What is "Butter Guéméné" or "Butter Kouign-aman"?: Since version 2.7, IMITATOR has a version name (following the customs of other projects almost as large as IMITATOR, such as Ubuntu or Android) in addition to its version number. For the version names of IMITATOR, we use the ingredients of the Breton galette; butter and andouille de Guéméné are two common (and tasty!) ingredients.
Where are we going after death?: We built a Minsky machine encoding this problem; we will come back to you as soon as it halts.