Strategic Issues, Problems and Challenges in Inductive Theorem Proving

Abstract(Automated) Inductive Theorem Proving (ITP) is a challenging field in automated reasoning and theorem proving. Typically, (Automated) Theorem Proving (TP) refers to methods, techniques and tools for automatically proving general (most often first-order) theorems. Nowadays, the field of TP has reached a certain degree of maturity and powerful TP systems are widely available and used. The situation with ITP is strikingly different, in the sense that proving inductive theorems in an essentially automatic way still is a very challenging task, even for the most advanced existing ITP systems. Both in general TP and in ITP, strategies for guiding the proof search process are of fundamental importance, in automated as well as in interactive or mixed settings. In the paper we will analyze and discuss the most important strategic and proof search issues in ITP, compare ITP with TP, and argue why ITP is in a sense much more challenging. More generally, we will systematically isolate, investigate and classify the main problems and challenges in ITP w.r.t. automation, on different levels and from different points of views. Finally, based on this analysis we will present some theses about the state of the art in the field, possible criteria for what could be considered as substantial progress, and promising lines of research for the future, towards (more) automated ITP

Considerations on Approaches and Metrics in Automated Theorem Generation/Finding in Geometry

The pursue of what are properties that can be identified to permit an automated reasoning program to generate and find new and interesting theorems is an interesting research goal (pun intended). The automatic discovery of new theorems is a goal in itself, and it has been addressed in specific areas, with different methods. The separation of the "weeds", uninteresting, trivial facts, from the "wheat", new and interesting facts, is much harder, but is also being addressed by different authors using different approaches. In this paper we will focus on geometry. We present and discuss different approaches for the automatic discovery of geometric theorems (and properties), and different metrics to find the interesting theorems among all those that were generated. After this description we will introduce the first result of this article: An undecidability result proving that having an algorithmic procedure that decides for every possible Turing Machine that produces theorems, whether it is able to produce also interesting theorems, is an undecidable problem. Consequently, we will argue that judging whether a theorem prover is able to produce interesting theorems remains a non deterministic task, at best a task to be addressed by program based in an algorithm guided by heuristics criteria. Therefore, as a human, to satisfy this task two things are necessary: An expert survey that sheds light on what a theorem prover/finder of interesting geometric theorems is, and-to enable this analysis- other surveys that clarify metrics and approaches related to the interestingness of geometric theorems. In the conclusion of this article we will introduce the structure of two of these surveys -the second result of this article- and we will discuss some future work.</p

Equational logic and rewriting

International audienceIn this survey, we do not address higher order logics nor type theory, but rather restrict to first-order concepts. We focus on equational logic and its relation to rewriting logic and we consider their impact on automated deduction and programming languages

Inductive Proof Search Modulo

International audienceWe present an original narrowing-based proof search method for inductive theorems in equational rewrite theories given by a rewrite system R and a set E of equalities. It has the specificity to be grounded on deduction modulo and to rely on narrowing to provide both induction variables and instantiation schemas. Whenever the equational rewrite system (R, E) has good properties of termination, sufficient completeness, and when E is constructor and variable preserving, narrowing at defined- innermost positions leads to consider only unifiers which are constructor substitutions. This is especially interesting for associative and associative-commutative theories for which the general proof search system is refined. The method is shown to be sound and refutationaly correct and complete. A major feature of our approach is to provide a constructive proof in deduction modulo for each successful instance of the proof search procedure

Narrowing Based Inductive Proof Search

Premiere version en 2005, en l'honneur de Harald GanzingerVersion finale envoyé a SpringerWe present in this paper a narrowing-based proof search method for inductive theorems. It has the specificity to be grounded on deduction modulo and to yield a direct translation from a successful proof search derivation to a proof in the sequent calculus. The method is shown to be sound and refutationally correct in a proof theoretical way