14,010 research outputs found
User-friendly Support for Common Concepts in a Lightweight Verifier
Machine verification of formal arguments can only increase our confidence in the correctness of those arguments, but the costs of employing machine verification still outweigh the benefits for some common kinds of formal reasoning activities. As a result, usability is becoming increasingly important in the design of formal verification tools. We describe the "aartifact" lightweight verification system, designed for processing formal arguments involving basic, ubiquitous mathematical concepts. The system is a prototype for investigating potential techniques for improving the usability of formal verification systems. It leverages techniques drawn both from existing work and from our own efforts. In addition to a parser for a familiar concrete syntax and a mechanism for automated syntax lookup, the system integrates (1) a basic logical inference algorithm, (2) a database of propositions governing common mathematical concepts, and (3) a data structure that computes congruence closures of expressions involving relations found in this database. Together, these components allow the system to better accommodate the expectations of users interested in verifying formal arguments involving algebraic and logical manipulations of numbers, sets, vectors, and related operators and predicates. We demonstrate the reasonable performance of this system on typical formal arguments and briefly discuss how the system's design contributed to its usability in two case studies
A Vernacular for Coherent Logic
We propose a simple, yet expressive proof representation from which proofs
for different proof assistants can easily be generated. The representation uses
only a few inference rules and is based on a frag- ment of first-order logic
called coherent logic. Coherent logic has been recognized by a number of
researchers as a suitable logic for many ev- eryday mathematical developments.
The proposed proof representation is accompanied by a corresponding XML format
and by a suite of XSL transformations for generating formal proofs for
Isabelle/Isar and Coq, as well as proofs expressed in a natural language form
(formatted in LATEX or in HTML). Also, our automated theorem prover for
coherent logic exports proofs in the proposed XML format. All tools are
publicly available, along with a set of sample theorems.Comment: CICM 2014 - Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics (2014
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