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Proof Relevant Corecursive Resolution
Resolution lies at the foundation of both logic programming and type class
context reduction in functional languages. Terminating derivations by
resolution have well-defined inductive meaning, whereas some non-terminating
derivations can be understood coinductively. Cycle detection is a popular
method to capture a small subset of such derivations. We show that in fact
cycle detection is a restricted form of coinductive proof, in which the atomic
formula forming the cycle plays the role of coinductive hypothesis.
This paper introduces a heuristic method for obtaining richer coinductive
hypotheses in the form of Horn formulas. Our approach subsumes cycle detection
and gives coinductive meaning to a larger class of derivations. For this
purpose we extend resolution with Horn formula resolvents and corecursive
evidence generation. We illustrate our method on non-terminating type class
resolution problems.Comment: 23 pages, with appendices in FLOPS 201
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