506 research outputs found
From LCF to Isabelle/HOL
Interactive theorem provers have developed dramatically over the past four
decades, from primitive beginnings to today's powerful systems. Here, we focus
on Isabelle/HOL and its distinctive strengths. They include automatic proof
search, borrowing techniques from the world of first order theorem proving, but
also the automatic search for counterexamples. They include a highly readable
structured language of proofs and a unique interactive development environment
for editing live proof documents. Everything rests on the foundation conceived
by Robin Milner for Edinburgh LCF: a proof kernel, using abstract types to
ensure soundness and eliminate the need to store proofs. Compared with the
research prototypes of the 1970s, Isabelle is a practical and versatile tool.
It is used by system designers, mathematicians and many others
Matching concepts across HOL libraries
Many proof assistant libraries contain formalizations of the same
mathematical concepts. The concepts are often introduced (defined) in different
ways, but the properties that they have, and are in turn formalized, are the
same. For the basic concepts, like natural numbers, matching them between
libraries is often straightforward, because of mathematical naming conventions.
However, for more advanced concepts, finding similar formalizations in
different libraries is a non-trivial task even for an expert.
In this paper we investigate automatic discovery of similar concepts across
libraries of proof assistants. We propose an approach for normalizing
properties of concepts in formal libraries and a number of similarity measures.
We evaluate the approach on HOL based proof assistants HOL4, HOL Light and
Isabelle/HOL, discovering 398 pairs of isomorphic constants and types
Harnessing Higher-Order (Meta-)Logic to Represent and Reason with Complex Ethical Theories
The computer-mechanization of an ambitious explicit ethical theory, Gewirth's
Principle of Generic Consistency, is used to showcase an approach for
representing and reasoning with ethical theories exhibiting complex logical
features like alethic and deontic modalities, indexicals, higher-order
quantification, among others. Harnessing the high expressive power of Church's
type theory as a meta-logic to semantically embed a combination of quantified
non-classical logics, our work pushes existing boundaries in knowledge
representation and reasoning. We demonstrate that intuitive encodings of
complex ethical theories and their automation on the computer are no longer
antipodes.Comment: 14 page
A Mechanized Model of the Theory of Objects
In this paper we present a formalization of Abadi's and Cardelli's theory of ob jects in the interactive theorem prover Isabelle/HOL. Our motivation is to build a mechanized HOL-framework for the analysis of a functional calculus for distributed ob jects. In particular, we present (a) a formal model of ob jects and its operational semantics based on de Bruijn indices (b) a parallel reduction relation for ob jects (c) the proof of confluence for the theory of ob jects reusing Nipkow's HOL-framework for the lambda calculus. We expect this framework to be highly reusable and allow further development and mechanized proofs of various aspects of ob ject theory, e.g., distribution, aspect orientation, typing
Formalising the pi-calculus using nominal logic
We formalise the pi-calculus using the nominal datatype package, based on
ideas from the nominal logic by Pitts et al., and demonstrate an implementation
in Isabelle/HOL. The purpose is to derive powerful induction rules for the
semantics in order to conduct machine checkable proofs, closely following the
intuitive arguments found in manual proofs. In this way we have covered many of
the standard theorems of bisimulation equivalence and congruence, both late and
early, and both strong and weak in a uniform manner. We thus provide one of the
most extensive formalisations of a process calculus ever done inside a theorem
prover.
A significant gain in our formulation is that agents are identified up to
alpha-equivalence, thereby greatly reducing the arguments about bound names.
This is a normal strategy for manual proofs about the pi-calculus, but that
kind of hand waving has previously been difficult to incorporate smoothly in an
interactive theorem prover. We show how the nominal logic formalism and its
support in Isabelle accomplishes this and thus significantly reduces the tedium
of conducting completely formal proofs. This improves on previous work using
weak higher order abstract syntax since we do not need extra assumptions to
filter out exotic terms and can keep all arguments within a familiar
first-order logic.Comment: 36 pages, 3 figure
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