FLOC 2018: FEDERATED LOGIC CONFERENCE 2018
Set of Support for Higher-Order Reasoning

Authors: Ahmed Bhayat and Giles Reger

Paper Information

Title:Set of Support for Higher-Order Reasoning
Authors:Ahmed Bhayat and Giles Reger
Proceedings:PAAR papers
Editors: Boris Konev, Josef Urban and Philipp Ruemmer
Keywords:theorem proving, first-order logic, higher-order logic
Abstract:

ABSTRACT. Higher-order logic (HOL) is utilised in numerous domains from program verification to the formalisation of mathematics. However, automated reasoning in the higher-order domain lags behind first-order automation. Many higher-order automated provers translate portions of HOL problems to first-order logic (FOL) and pass them to FOL provers. However, FOL provers are not optimised for dealing with these translations. One of the reasons for this is that the axioms introduced during the translation (e.g. those defining combinators) may combine with each during proof search, deriving consequences of the axioms irrelevant to the goal. In this work we evaluate the extent to which this issue affects proof search and introduce heuristics based on the set-of-support strategy for minimising the effects. Our experiments are carried out within the Vampire theorem prover and show that limiting how axioms introduced during translation can improve proof search with higher-order problems.

Pages:15
Talk:Jul 19 14:30 (Session 134D: Automated Reasoning II)
Paper: