History and Prospects for First-Order Automated Deduction

Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 9195)

Abstract

On the fiftieth anniversary of the appearance of Robinson’s resolution paper [57], it is appropriate to consider the history and status of theorem proving, as well as its possible future directions. Here we discuss the history of first-order theorem proving both before and after 1965, with some personal reflections. We then generalize model-based reasoning to first-order provers, and discuss what it means for a prover to be goal sensitive. We also present a way to analyze asymptotically the size of the search space of a first-order prover in terms of the size of a minimal unsatisfiable set of ground instances of a set of first-order clauses.

Keywords

First-order logic Resolution Theorem proving Instance-based methods Model-based reasoning Goal-sensitivity Search space sizes Term rewriting Complexity 
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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Computer ScienceUNC Chapel HillChapel HillUSA

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