167 research outputs found
Set of support, demodulation, paramodulation: a historical perspective
This article is a tribute to the scientific legacy of automated reasoning pioneer and JAR founder Lawrence T. (Larry) Wos. Larry's main technical contributions were the set-of-support strategy for resolution theorem proving, and the demodulation and paramodulation inference rules for building equality into resolution. Starting from the original definitions of these concepts in Larry's papers, this survey traces their evolution, unearthing the often forgotten trails that connect Larry's original definitions to those that became standard in the field
New results on rewrite-based satisfiability procedures
Program analysis and verification require decision procedures to reason on
theories of data structures. Many problems can be reduced to the satisfiability
of sets of ground literals in theory T. If a sound and complete inference
system for first-order logic is guaranteed to terminate on T-satisfiability
problems, any theorem-proving strategy with that system and a fair search plan
is a T-satisfiability procedure. We prove termination of a rewrite-based
first-order engine on the theories of records, integer offsets, integer offsets
modulo and lists. We give a modularity theorem stating sufficient conditions
for termination on a combinations of theories, given termination on each. The
above theories, as well as others, satisfy these conditions. We introduce
several sets of benchmarks on these theories and their combinations, including
both parametric synthetic benchmarks to test scalability, and real-world
problems to test performances on huge sets of literals. We compare the
rewrite-based theorem prover E with the validity checkers CVC and CVC Lite.
Contrary to the folklore that a general-purpose prover cannot compete with
reasoners with built-in theories, the experiments are overall favorable to the
theorem prover, showing that not only the rewriting approach is elegant and
conceptually simple, but has important practical implications.Comment: To appear in the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 49 page
Introducing Quantified Cuts in Logic with Equality
Cut-introduction is a technique for structuring and compressing formal
proofs. In this paper we generalize our cut-introduction method for the
introduction of quantified lemmas of the form (for
quantifier-free ) to a method generating lemmas of the form . Moreover, we extend the original method to predicate
logic with equality. The new method was implemented and applied to the TSTP
proof database. It is shown that the extension of the method to handle equality
and quantifier-blocks leads to a substantial improvement of the old algorithm
Larry Wos - Visions of automated reasoning
This paper celebrates the scientific discoveries and the service to the automated reasoning community of Lawrence (Larry) T. Wos, who passed away in August 2020. The narrative covers Larry's most long-lasting ideas about inference rules and search strategies for theorem proving, his work on applications of theorem proving, and a collection of personal memories and anecdotes that let readers appreciate Larry's personality and enthusiasm for automated reasoning
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