Conquering the Meredith Single Axiom

• Authors: Larry Wos
• Venue: Journal of Automated Reasoning
• Year: 2001

For more than three and one-half decades, beginning in the early 1960s, a heavy emphasis on proof finding has been a key component of the Argonne paradigm, whose use has directly led to significant advances in automated reasoning and important contributions to mathematics and logic. The theorems studied range from the trivial to the deep, even including some that corresponded to open questions. Often the paradigm asks for a theorem whose proof is in hand but that cannot be obtained in a fully automated manner by the program in use. The theorem whose hypothesis consists solely of the Meredith single axiom for two-valued sentential (or propositional) calculus and whose conclusion is the Łukasiewicz three-axiom system for that area of formal logic was just such a theorem. Featured in this article is the methodology that enabled the program OTTER to find the first fully automated proof of the cited theorem, a proof with the intriguing property that none of its steps contains a term of the form in(in(it)) for any term it. As evidence of the power of the new methodology, the article also discusses OTTER's success in obtaining the first known proof of a theorem concerning a single axiom of Łukasiewicz.