Room 206 (2nd floor, badged access)
21 November 2019 - 14h00
Stronger Higher-order Automation
by Sophie Tourret from Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken
Abstract: Automated reasoning in first-order logic (FOL) is becoming a mature research domain. It has led to the development of powerful tools such as superposition-based theorem provers and SMT solvers (Satisfiability Modulo Theory solvers), that have found and continue to find many applications in industry and research.
One such application is the automation of proofs in interactive theorem proving (ITP), where proof assistants are used to write computer-checked proofs of theorems, generally expressed in a variant of higher-order logic (HOL). This automation is realised via hammers, that attempt to delegate the proof obligations to first-order automated provers. However, in the translation from HOL to FOL, hammers obfuscate the structure of terms and formulas through the application of a sequence of encodings, although it is this very structure that the provers exploit to find proofs efficiently.
This situation is less than ideal, and if until a few years ago, the ITP and ATP communities were working in parallel, mostly ignoring each other, there is nowadays a trend pushing to bring the two communities closer. The work that I will present in this talk is part of this trend. It includes ongoing research that is either improving higher-order automation with respect to ITP applications or using ITP as a vehicle for ATP research.
