FLOC 2018: FEDERATED LOGIC CONFERENCE 2018
ProofWatch: Watchlist Guidance for Large Theories in E

Authors: Zarathustra Goertzel, Jan Jakubuv, Stephan Schulz and Josef Urban

Paper Information

Title:ProofWatch: Watchlist Guidance for Large Theories in E
Authors:Zarathustra Goertzel, Jan Jakubuv, Stephan Schulz and Josef Urban
Proceedings:ITP Papers
Editors: Jeremy Avigad and Assia Mahboubi
Keywords:proof automation, hammers, large libraries, proof guidance, watchlist guidance
Abstract:

ABSTRACT. 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.

Pages:19
Talk:Jul 12 15:00 (Session 77B)
Paper: