240 research outputs found
Hilbert's Program Then and Now
Hilbert's program was an ambitious and wide-ranging project in the philosophy
and foundations of mathematics. In order to "dispose of the foundational
questions in mathematics once and for all, "Hilbert proposed a two-pronged
approach in 1921: first, classical mathematics should be formalized in
axiomatic systems; second, using only restricted, "finitary" means, one should
give proofs of the consistency of these axiomatic systems. Although Godel's
incompleteness theorems show that the program as originally conceived cannot be
carried out, it had many partial successes, and generated important advances in
logical theory and meta-theory, both at the time and since. The article
discusses the historical background and development of Hilbert's program, its
philosophical underpinnings and consequences, and its subsequent development
and influences since the 1930s.Comment: 43 page
Formal logic: Classical problems and proofs
Not focusing on the history of classical logic, this book provides discussions and quotes central passages on its origins and development, namely from a philosophical perspective. Not being a book in mathematical logic, it takes formal logic from an essentially mathematical perspective. Biased towards a computational approach, with SAT and VAL as its backbone, this is an introduction to logic that covers essential aspects of the three branches of logic, to wit, philosophical, mathematical, and computational
In Praise of Impredicativity: A Contribution to the Formalization of Meta-Programming
Processing programs as data is one of the successes of functional and logic programming. Higher-order functions, as program-processing programs are called in functional programming, and meta-programs, as they are called in logic programming, are widespread declarative programming techniques. In logic programming, there is a gap between the meta-programming practice and its theory: The formalizations of meta-programming do not explicitly address its impredicativity and are not fully adequate. This article aims at overcoming this unsatisfactory situation by discussing the relevance of impredicativity to meta-programming, by revisiting former formalizations of meta-programming, and by defining Reflective Predicate Logic, a conservative extension of first-order logic, which provides a simple formalization of meta-programming
A simple sequent calculus for nominal logic
Nominal logic is a variant of first-order logic that provides support for
reasoning about bound names in abstract syntax. A key feature of nominal logic
is the new-quantifier, which quantifies over fresh names (names not appearing
in any values considered so far). Previous attempts have been made to develop
convenient rules for reasoning with the new-quantifier, but we argue that none
of these attempts is completely satisfactory.
In this article we develop a new sequent calculus for nominal logic in which
the rules for the new- quantifier are much simpler than in previous attempts.
We also prove several structural and metatheoretic properties, including
cut-elimination, consistency, and equivalence to Pitts' axiomatization of
nominal logic
On Automating the Doctrine of Double Effect
The doctrine of double effect () is a long-studied ethical
principle that governs when actions that have both positive and negative
effects are to be allowed. The goal in this paper is to automate
. We briefly present , and use a first-order
modal logic, the deontic cognitive event calculus, as our framework to
formalize the doctrine. We present formalizations of increasingly stronger
versions of the principle, including what is known as the doctrine of triple
effect. We then use our framework to simulate successfully scenarios that have
been used to test for the presence of the principle in human subjects. Our
framework can be used in two different modes: One can use it to build
-compliant autonomous systems from scratch, or one can use it to
verify that a given AI system is -compliant, by applying a
layer on an existing system or model. For the latter mode, the
underlying AI system can be built using any architecture (planners, deep neural
networks, bayesian networks, knowledge-representation systems, or a hybrid); as
long as the system exposes a few parameters in its model, such verification is
possible. The role of the layer here is akin to a (dynamic or
static) software verifier that examines existing software modules. Finally, we
end by presenting initial work on how one can apply our layer
to the STRIPS-style planning model, and to a modified POMDP model.This is
preliminary work to illustrate the feasibility of the second mode, and we hope
that our initial sketches can be useful for other researchers in incorporating
DDE in their own frameworks.Comment: 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2017;
Special Track on AI & Autonom
Understanding Gentzen and Frege Systems for QBF
Recently Beyersdorff, Bonacina, and Chew [10] introduced a natural class of Frege systems for quantified Boolean formulas (QBF) and showed strong lower bounds for restricted versions of these systems. Here we provide a comprehensive analysis of the new extended Frege system from [10], denoted EF + âred, which is a natural extension of classical extended Frege EF. Our main results are the following: Firstly, we prove that the standard Gentzen-style system G*1 p-simulates EF + âred and that G*1 is strictly stronger under standard complexity-theoretic hardness assumptions.
Secondly, we show a correspondence of EF + âred to bounded arithmetic: EF + âred can be seen as the non-uniform propositional version of intuitionistic S12. Specifically, intuitionistic S12 proofs of arbitrary statements in prenex form translate to polynomial-size EF + âred proofs, and EF + âred is in a sense the weakest system with this property. Finally, we show that unconditional lower bounds for EF + âred would imply either a major breakthrough in circuit complexity or in classical proof complexity, and in fact the converse implications hold as well. Therefore, the system EF + âred naturally unites the central problems from circuit and proof complexity.
Technically, our results rest on a formalised strategy extraction theorem for EF + âred akin to witnessing in intuitionistic S12 and a normal form for EF + âred proofs
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