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Building and executing proof strategies in a formal metatheory

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Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA 1993)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 728))

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Abstract

This paper describes how “safe” proof strategies are represented and executed in the interactive theorem prover GETFOL. A formal metatheory (MT) describes and allows to reason about object level inference. A class of MT terms, called logic, tactics, is used to represent proof strategies. The semantic attachment facility and the evaluation mechanism of the GETFOL system have been used to provide the procedural interpretation of logic tactics. The execution of logic tactics is then proved to be “safe” under the termination condition. The implementation within the GETFOL system is described and the synthesis of a logic tactic implementing a normalizer in negative normal form is presented as a case study.

This work has been partly done as part of the MAIA project developed at IRST. It has been partly supported by the Italian National Research Council (CNR), Progetto Finalizzato Sistemi Informatici e Calcolo Parallelo (Special Project on Information Systems and Parallel Computing). The authors thank the members of the Mechanized Reasoning Group for useful feedback and discussions. Fausto Giunchiglia and Paolo Traverso are specially thanked for their previous work on tactics.

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Pietro Torasso

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© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Armando, A., Cimatti, A., Viganò, L. (1993). Building and executing proof strategies in a formal metatheory. In: Torasso, P. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI*IA 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 728. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57292-9_37

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57292-9_37

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