The poor man's proof assistant: using prolog to develop formal language theoretic proofs

  • Authors:
  • Joey Eremondi

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 companion publication for conference on Systems, programming, & applications: software for humanity
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

While proving a theorem from a set of axioms is undecidable in first order logic, recent development has produced several tools which serve as automated theorem provers. However, often these systems are too complex for a given problem. Their usefulness is outweighed by the difficulty of learning a new tool or translating results into computer-readable form. I describe tools developed in Prolog to partially characterize the shuffle-inclusion problem. These tools allowed for rapid development of proofs with little intellectual overhead. While focused around a specific problem, the techniques described are general, and well suited to many problems on discrete structures.