Watchlist (also hint list) is a mechanism that allows related proofs to guide
a proof search for a new conjecture. This mechanism has been used with the
Otter and Prover9 theorem provers, both for interactive formalizations and for
human-assisted proving of open conjectures in small theories. In this work we
explore the use of watchlists in large theories coming from first-order
translations of large ITP libraries, aiming at improving hammer-style
automation by smarter internal guidance of the ATP systems. In particular, we
(i) design watchlist-based clause evaluation heuristics inside the E ATP
system, and (ii) develop new proof guiding algorithms that load many previous
proofs inside the ATP and focus the proof search using a dynamically updated
notion of proof matching. The methods are evaluated on a large set of problems
coming from the Mizar library, showing significant improvement of E's standard
portfolio of strategies, and also of the previous best set of strategies
invented for Mizar by evolutionary methods.Comment: 19 pages, 10 tables, submitted to ITP 2018 at FLO