The Next Generation of Interactive Theorem Provers

Abstract

Prior to discussing what I see as desirable and achievable features of the next generation of interactive theorem provers, I want to say something about the history of my own work and that of my colleagues, which forms the basis for the view of the future I sketch in the remainder of this paper. Simple uses of an interactive theorem prover for the teaching of elementary logic began more than twenty years ago. I remember well our first demonstrations with elementary-school children in 1963. For a number of years we concentrated on teaching elementary logic and algebra to bright elementary- and middle-school children. We felt at the time that this was the right level of difficulty to reach for in terms of computer capacity and resources that could be devoted to the endeavor. All of this early work was done on one of the low-serial-number PDP-l’s, which John McCarthy and I jointly purchased from grants at Stanford in 1963. This early work has been described in (1965) and (1972).