Special relations in automated deduction

  • Authors:
  • Zohar Manna;Richard Waldinger

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA;SRI International, Menlo Park, CA

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM) - The MIT Press scientific computation series
  • Year:
  • 1986

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Abstract

Two deduction rules are introduced to give streamlined treatment to relations of special importance in an automated theorem-proving system. These rules, the relation replacement and relation matching rules, generalize to an arbitrary binary relation the paramodulation and E-resolution rules, respectively, for equality, and may operate within a nonclausal or clausal system. The new rules depend on an extension of the notion of polarity to apply to subterms as well as to subsentences, with respect to a given binary relation. The rules allow us to eliminate troublesome axioms, such as transitivity and monotonicity, from the system; proofs are shorter and more comprehensible, and the search space is correspondingly deflated.