Formalization, Mechanization and Automation of G\"odel's Proof of God's Existence

G\"odel's ontological proof has been analysed for the first-time with an unprecedent degree of detail and formality with the help of higher-order theorem provers. The following has been done (and in this order): A detailed natural deduction proof. A formalization of the axioms, definitions and theorems in the TPTP THF syntax. Automatic verification of the consistency of the axioms and definitions with Nitpick. Automatic demonstration of the theorems with the provers LEO-II and Satallax. A step-by-step formalization using the Coq proof assistant. A formalization using the Isabelle proof assistant, where the theorems (and some additional lemmata) have been automated with Sledgehammer and Metis.Comment: 2 page

Computer Science and Metaphysics: A Cross-Fertilization

Computational philosophy is the use of mechanized computational techniques to unearth philosophical insights that are either difficult or impossible to find using traditional philosophical methods. Computational metaphysics is computational philosophy with a focus on metaphysics. In this paper, we (a) develop results in modal metaphysics whose discovery was computer assisted, and (b) conclude that these results work not only to the obvious benefit of philosophy but also, less obviously, to the benefit of computer science, since the new computational techniques that led to these results may be more broadly applicable within computer science. The paper includes a description of our background methodology and how it evolved, and a discussion of our new results.Comment: 39 pages, 3 figure

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Modal and Relevance Logics for Qualitative Spatial Reasoning

Qualitative Spatial Reasoning (QSR) is an alternative technique to represent spatial relations without using numbers. Regions and their relationships are used as qualitative terms. Mostly peer qualitative spatial reasonings has two aspect: (a) the first aspect is based on inclusion and it focuses on the ”part-of” relationship. This aspect is mathematically covered by mereology. (b) the second aspect focuses on topological nature, i.e., whether they are in ”contact” without having a common part. Mereotopology is a mathematical theory that covers these two aspects. The theoretical aspect of this thesis is to use classical propositional logic with non-classical relevance logic to obtain a logic capable of reasoning about Boolean algebras i.e., the mereological aspect of QSR. Then, we extended the logic further by adding modal logic operators in order to reason about topological contact i.e., the topological aspect of QSR. Thus, we name this logic Modal Relevance Logic (MRL). We have provided a natural deduction system for this logic by defining inference rules for the operators and constants used in our (MRL) logic and shown that our system is correct. Furthermore, we have used the functional programming language and interactive theorem prover Coq to implement the definitions and natural deduction rules in order to provide an interactive system for reasoning in the logic

LFTOP: An LF based approach to domain specific reasoning

Specialized vocabulary, notations and inference rules tailored for the description, analysis and reasoning of a domain is very important for the domain. For domain-specific issues researchers focus mainly on the design and implementation of domain-specific languages (DSL) and pay little attention to the reasoning aspects. We believe that domain-specific reasoning is very important to help the proofs of some properties of the domains and should be more concise, more reusable and more believable. It deserves to be investigated in an engineering way. Type theory provides good support for generic reasoning and verification. Many type theorists want to extend uses of type theory to more domains, and believe that the methods, ideas, and technology of type theory can have a beneficial effect for computer assisted reasoning in many domains. Proof assistants based on type theory are well known as effective tools to support reasoning. But these proof assistants have focused primarily on generic notations for representation of problems and are oriented towards helping expert type theorists build proofs efficiently. They are successful in this goal, but they are less suitable for use by non-specialists. In other words, one of the big barriers to limit the use of type theory and proof assistant in domain-specific areas is that it requires significant expertise to use it effectively. We present LFTOP ― a new approach to domain-specific reasoning that is based on a type-theoretic logical framework (LP) but does not require the user to be an expert in type theory. In this approach, users work on a domain-specific interface that is familiar to them. The interface presents a reasoning system of the domain through a user-oriented syntax. A middle layer provides translation between the user syntax and LF， and allows additional support for reasoning (e.g. model checking). Thus, the complexity of the logical framework is hidden but we also retain the benefits of using type theory and its related tools, such as precision and machine-checkable proofs. The approach is being investigated through a number of case studies. In each case study, the relevant domain-specific specification languages and logic are formalized in Plastic. The relevant reasoning system is designed and customized for the users of the corresponding specific domain. The corresponding lemmas are proved in Plastic. We analyze the advantages and shortcomings of this approach, define some new concepts related to the approach, especially discuss issues arising from the translation between the different levels. A prototype implementation is developed. We illustrate the approach through many concrete examples in the prototype implementation. The study of this thesis shows that the approach is feasible and promising, the relevant methods and technologies are useful and effective

09411 Abstracts Collection -- Interaction versus Automation: The two Faces of Deduction

From 04.10. to 09.10.2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09411 ``Interaction versus Automation: The two Faces of Deduction\u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Recent Successes with a Meta-Logical Approach to Universal Logical Reasoning (Extended Abstract)

The quest for a most general framework supporting universal reasoning is very prominently represented in the works of Leibniz. He envisioned a scientia generalis founded on a characteristica universalis, that is, a most universal formal language in which all knowledge about the world and the sciences can be encoded. A quick study of the survey literature on logical formalisms suggests that quite the opposite to Leibniz’ dream has become reality. Instead of a characteristica universalis, we are today facing a very rich and heterogenous zoo of different logical systems, and instead of converging towards a single superior logic, this logic zoo is further expanding, eventually even at accelerated pace. As a consequence, the unified vision of Leibniz seems farther away than ever before. However, there are also some promising initiatives to counteract these diverging developments. Attempts at unifying approaches to logic include categorial logic algebraic logic and coalgebraic logic

Krivine realizability for compiler correctness

We propose a semantic type soundness result, formalized in the Coq proof assistant, for a compiler from a simple functional language to SECD machine code. Our result is quite independent from the source language as it uses Krivine's realizability to give a denotational semantics to SECD machine code using only the type system of the source language. We use realizability to prove the correctness of both a call-by-name (CBN) and a call-by-value (CBV) compiler with the same notion of orthogonality. We abstract over the notion of observation (e.g. divergence or termination) and derive an operational correctness result that relates the reduction of a term with the execution of its compiled SECD machine code