An unusual application of program-proving

  • Authors:
  • Mitchell Wand

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • STOC '73 Proceedings of the fifth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
  • Year:
  • 1973

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Abstract

An inductive proof in mathematics may often be expressed as an algorithm and a proof that the algorithm is correct. Especially when the proof proceeds by cases, a recursive pattern-matching language, such as Hewitt's MATCHLESS, is a felicitous language for writing the algorithm. We use this idea to prove a new mathematical result, which itself is of interest in computer science. We define objects called k-models. Our main theorem is a necessary and sufficient condition for a k-model to be the restriction of a k+1-model.