Evaluating general purpose automated theorem proving systems

AbstractA key concern of ATP research is the development of more powerful systems, capable of solving more difficult problems within the same resource limits. In order to build more powerful systems, it is important to understand which systems, and hence which techniques, work well for what types of problems. This paper deals with the empirical evaluation of general purpose ATP systems, to determine which systems work well for what types of problems. This requires also dealing with the issues of assigning ATP problems into classes that are reasonably homogeneous with respect to the ATP systems that (attempt to) solve the problems, and assigning ratings to problems based on their difficulty

TH1: The TPTP Typed Higher-Order Form with Rank-1 Polymorphism

Abstract The TPTP world is a well established infrastructure that supports research, development, and deployment of Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) systems for classical logics. The TPTP language is one of the keys to the success of the TPTP world. Originally the TPTP world supported only first-order clause normal form (CNF). Over the years support for full first-order form (FOF), monomorphic typed firstorder form (TF0), rank-1 polymorphic typed first-order form (TF1), and monomorphic typed higher-order form (TH0) have been added. The TF0, TF1, and TH0 languages also include constructs for arithmetic. This paper introduces the TH1 form, an extension of TH0 with TF1-style rank-1 polymorphism. TH1 is designed to be easy to process by existing reasoning tools that support ML-style polymorphism. The hope is that TH1 will be implemented in many popular ATP systems for typed higher-order logic

Representation, Verification, and Visualization of Tarskian Interpretations for Typed First-order Logic

peer reviewedThis paper describes a new format for representing Tarskian-style interpretations for formulae in typed first-order logic, using the TPTP TF0 language. It further describes a technique and an implemented tool for verifying models using this representation, and a tool for visualizing interpretations. The research contributes to the advancement of automated reasoning technology for model finding, which has several applications, including verification

Visualising First-Order Proof Search

This paper describes a method for visualising proof search in automatic resolution-style first-order theorem provers. The method has been implemented in a simple tool called viz, which takes advantage of the widely-supported scalar vector graphics format to produce graphs which can be viewed interactively. This allows the user to zoom in and out, pan, and get more information by clicking on particular parts of the graph. We demonstrate how the graphs can be used to suggest improvements to the strategy and heuristics used in the proof attempt

leanCoP: lean connection-based theorem proving

AbstractThe Prolog programimplements a theorem prover for classical first-order (clausal) logic which is based on the connection calculus. It is sound and complete (provided that an arbitrarily large I is iteratively given), and demonstrates a comparatively strong performance

Cooperation between Top-Down and Bottom-Up Theorem Provers

Top-down and bottom-up theorem proving approaches each have specific advantages and disadvantages. Bottom-up provers profit from strong redundancy control but suffer from the lack of goal-orientation, whereas top-down provers are goal-oriented but often have weak calculi when their proof lengths are considered. In order to integrate both approaches, we try to achieve cooperation between a top-down and a bottom-up prover in two different ways: The first technique aims at supporting a bottom-up with a top-down prover. A top-down prover generates subgoal clauses, they are then processed by a bottom-up prover. The second technique deals with the use of bottom-up generated lemmas in a top-down prover. We apply our concept to the areas of model elimination and superposition. We discuss the ability of our techniques to shorten proofs as well as to reorder the search space in an appropriate manner. Furthermore, in order to identify subgoal clauses and lemmas which are actually relevant for the proof task, we develop methods for a relevancy-based filtering. Experiments with the provers SETHEO and SPASS performed in the problem library TPTP reveal the high potential of our cooperation approaches