Abstract

Automated theorem proving has made great progress during the last few decades. Proofs of more and more difficult theorems are being found faster and faster. However, the exponential increase in the size of the search space remains for many theorem proving problems. Logic program analysis and transformation techniques have also made progress during the last few years and automated theorem proving can benefit from these techniques if they can be made applicable to general theorem proving problems. In this thesis we investigate the applicability of logic program analysis and transformation techniques to automated theorem proving. Our aim is to speed up theorem provers by avoiding useless search. This is done by detecting and deleting parts of the theorem prover and theory under consideration that are not needed for proving a given formula. The analysis and transformation techniques developed for logic programs can be applied in automated theorem proving via a programming technique called ...

Citations