We explore the possibility of automating <i>NP</i>-hardness reductions. We motivate the problem from an artificial intelligence perspective, then propose the use of second-order existential (<i>SO</i>&#8707;) logic as representation language for decision problems. Building upon the theoretical framework of J. Antonio Medina, we explore the possibility of implementing seven syntactic operators. Each operator transforms <i>SO</i>&#8707; sentences in a way that preserves <i>NP</i>-completeness. We subsequently propose a program which implements these operators. We discuss a number of theoretical and practical barriers to this task. We prove that determining whether two <i>SO</i>&#8707; sentences are equivalent is as hard as GRAPH ISOMORPHISM, and prove that determining whether an arbitrary <i>SO</i>&#8707; sentence represents an <i>NP</i>-complete problem is undecidable.

This paper describes the proof calculus LD for clausal propositional logic, which is a linearized form of the well-known DPLL calculus extended by clause learning. It is motivated by the demand to model how current SAT solvers built on clause learning are working, while abstracting from decision heuristics and implementation details. The calculus is proved sound and terminating. Further, it is shown that both the original DPLL calculus and the conflict-directed backtracking calculus with clause learning, as it is implemented in many current SAT solvers, are complete and proof-confluent instances of the LD calculus. / Dieser Artikel beschreibt den Beweiskalkül LD für aussagenlogische Formeln in Klauselform. Dieser Kalkül ist eine um Klausellernen erweiterte linearisierte Variante des bekannten DPLL-Kalküls. Er soll dazu dienen, das Verhalten von auf Klausellernen basierenden SAT-Beweisern zu modellieren, wobei von Entscheidungsheuristiken und Implementierungsdetails abstrahiert werden soll. Es werden Korrektheit und Terminierung des Kalküls bewiesen. Weiterhin wird gezeigt, dass sowohl der ursprüngliche DPLL-Kalkül als auch der konfliktgesteuerte Rücksetzalgorithmus mit Klausellernen, wie er in vielen aktuellen SAT-Beweisern implementiert ist, vollständige und beweiskonfluente Spezialisierungen des LD-Kalküls sind.

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Mechanized theorem proving is a promising means of formally establishing facts about complex systems. However, in applying theorem proving methodologies to industrial-scale hardware and software systems, a large amount of user interaction is required in order to prove useful properties. In practice, the human user tasked with such a verification must gain a deep understanding of the system to be verified, and prove numerous lemmas in order to allow the theorem proving program to approach a proof of the desired fact. Furthermore, proofs that fail during this process are a source of confusion: the proof may either fail because the conjecture was false, or because the prover required more help from the user in order to reach the desired conclusion. We have implemented a symbolic execution framework inside the ACL2 theorem prover in order to help address these issues on certain problem domains. Our framework introduces a proof strategy that applies bit-level symbolic execution using BDDs to finite-domain problems. This proof strategy is a fully verified decision procedure for such problems, and on many useful problem domains its capacity vastly exceeds that of exhaustive testing. Our framework also produces counterexamples for conjectures that it determines to be false. Our framework seeks to reduce the amount of necessary user interaction in proving theorems about industrial-scale hardware and software systems. By increasing the automation available in the prover, we allow the user to complete useful proofs while understanding less of the detailed implementation of the system. Furthermore, by producing counterexamples for falsified conjectures, our framework reduces the time spent by the user in trying to determine why a proof failed. / text

This document presents a formula selection system for classical first order theorem proving based on the relevance of formulae for the proof of a conjecture. It is based on unifiability of predicates and is also able to use a linguistic approach for the selection. The scope of the technique is the reduction of the set of formulae and the increase of the amount of provable conjectures in a given time. Since the technique generates a subset of the formula set, it can be used as a preprocessor for automated theorem proving. The document contains the conception, implementation and evaluation of both selection concepts. While the one concept generates a search graph over the negation normal forms or Skolem normal forms of the given formulae, the linguistic concept analyses the formulae and determines frequencies of lexemes and uses a tf-idf weighting algorithm to determine the relevance of the formulae. Though the concept is built for first order logic, it is not limited to it. The concept can be used for higher order and modal logik, too, with minimal adoptions. The system was also evaluated at the world championship of automated theorem provers (CADE ATP Systems Competition, CASC-24) in combination with the leanCoP theorem prover and the evaluation of the results of the CASC and the benchmarks with the problems of the CASC of the year 2012 (CASC-J6) show that the concept of the system has positive impact to the performance of automated theorem provers. Also, the benchmarks with two different theorem provers which use different calculi have shown that the selection is independent from the calculus. Moreover, the concept of TEMPLAR has shown to be competitive to some extent with the concept of SinE and even helped one of the theorem provers to solve problems that were not (or slower) solved with SinE selection in the CASC. Finally, the evaluation implies that the combination of the unification based and linguistic selection yields more improved results though no optimisation was done for the problems. / Dieses Dokument stellt ein System vor, das aus einer (großen) gegebenen Menge von Formeln der klassischen Prädikatenlogik eine Teilmenge auswählt, die für den Beweis einer logischen Formel relevant sind. Ziel des Systems ist, die Beweisbarkeit von Formeln in einer festen Zeitschranke zu ermöglichen oder die Beweissuche durch die eingeschränkte Formelmenge zu beschleunigen. Das Dokument beschreibt die Konzeption, Implementierung und Evaluation des Systems und geht dabei auf die zwei verschiedenen Ansätze zur Auswahl ein. Während das eine Konzept eine Graphensuche wahlweise auf den Negations-Normalformen oder Skolem-Normalformen der Formeln durchführt, indem Pfade von einer Formel zu einer anderen durch Unifikation von Prädikaten gebildet werden, analysiert das andere Konzept die Häufigkeiten von Lexemen und bildet einen Relevanzwert durch Anwendung des in der Computerlinguistik bekannten tf-idf-Maßes. Es werden die Ergebnisse der Weltmeisterschaft der automatischen Theorembeweiser (CADE ATP Systems Competition, CASC-24) vorgestellt und der Effekt des Systems für die Beweissuche analysiert. Weiterhin werden die Ergebnisse der Tests des Systems auf den Problemen der Weltmeisterschaft aus dem Jahre 2012 (CASC-J6) vorgestellt. Es wird darauf basierend evaluiert, inwieweit die Einschränkungen die Theorembeweiser bei dem Beweis komplexer Probleme unterstützen. Letztendlich wird gezeigt, dass das System einerseits positive Effekte für die Theorembeweiser hat und andererseits unabhängig von dem Kalkül ist, den die Theorembeweiser nutzen. Ferner ist der Ansatz unabhängig von der genutzten Logik und kann prinzipiell für alle Stufen der Prädikatenlogik und Aussagenlogik sowie Modallogik genutzt werden. Dieser Aspekt macht den Ansatz universell im automatischen Theorembeweisen nutzbar. Es zeigt sich, dass beide Ansätze zur Auswahl für verschiedene Formelmengen geeignet sind. Es wird auch gezeigt, dass die Kombination beider Ansätze eine signifikante Erhöhung der beweisbaren Formeln zur Folge hat und dass die Auswahl durch die Ansätze mit den Fähigkeiten eines anderen Auswahl-Systems mithalten kann.

A number of questions regarding programs involving heap-based data structures can be phrased as questions about numeric properties of those structures. A data structure traversal might terminate if the length of some path is eventually zero or a function to remove n elements from a collection may only be safe if the collection has size at least n. In this thesis, we develop proof methods for reasoning about the connection between heap-manipulating programs and numeric programs. In addition, we develop an automatic method for producing numeric abstractions of heap-manipulating programs. These numeric abstractions are expressed as simple imperative programs over integer variables and have the feature that if a property holds of the numeric program, then it also holds of the original, heap-manipulating program. This is true for both safety and liveness. The abstraction procedure makes use of a shape analysis based on separation logic and has support for user-defined inductive data structures. We also discuss a number of applications of this technique. Numeric abstractions, once obtained, can be analyzed with a variety of existing verification tools. Termination provers can be used to reason about termination of the numeric abstraction, and thus termination of the original program. Safety checkers can be used to reason about assertion safety. And bound inference tools can be used to obtain bounds on the values of program variables. With small changes to the program source, bounds analysis also allows the computation of symbolic bounds on memory use and computational complexity.

Det finns en problematik i övergången för svenska studenter mellan gymnasiet och högskolan. En faktor i den problematiken är att bevis och bevisföring hanteras på olika sätt på de olika utbildningsnivåerna. Dessutom är forskning kring hur läroböcker hanterar bevis och bevisföring begränsad. I denna studie undersöks två vanliga läroböcker på gymnasiet med avseende på bevis och bevisföring. Utifrån de i ämnesplanen befintliga ämnesområdena granskas teoriavsnitten i läroböckerna med fokus på bevis och bevisföring. Dessutom undersöks bevisföringsuppgifter med utgångspunkt i G. Stylianides (2009) ramverk. Resultaten visar att läroböckerna är inkonsekventa i sitt hanterande av bevis och att bevis ofta osynliggörs i teoriavsnitten. Ett annat resultat är att den matematiska strukturen är svår att följa. Läroböckerna innehåller 6,7 % respektive 13,7 % bevisföringsuppgifter och vi har funnit 19 olika typer av bevisföringsuppgifter varav två typer är väldigt dominerande. Vi argumenterar att didaktiskt värdefulla syften kan uppnås genom att synliggöra bevis bättre i läroböcker. / There exists a problem in Swedish students’ transition between high school and college. One factor of this problem stems from the fact that proofs and proving are handled in different ways at these different levels of education. In addition, research on how textbooks deal with proofs and proving is limited. This study examines proofs and proving in two common math textbooks intended for upper secondary high school students in Sweden. Based on the contents of the curriculum, the theoretical sections in the textbooks are examined with an added focus on proofs and proving. Also, the textbooks’ tasks are examined with the help of a modified framework based on G. Stylianides (2009) framework. The results show that the textbooks are inconsistent in their handling of proofs and that proofs are often made invisible in the theoretical sections. Another result is that the mathematical structure is difficult to follow. The textbooks contain 6.7% and 13.7% proving tasks respectively and we have found 19 different types of proving tasks among which two types are very dominant. We argue that didactically valuable objectives can be achieved by making proofs more visible in textbooks.

In this thesis we develop efficient methods for automated proof search within an important class of mathematical logics. The logics considered are the varying, cumulative and constant domain versions of the first-order modal logics K, K4, D, D4, T, S4 and S5, and first-order intuitionistic logic. The use of these non-classical logics is commonplace within Computing Science and Artificial Intelligence in applications in which efficient machine assisted proof search is essential. Traditional techniques for the design of efficient proof methods for classical logic prove to be of limited use in this context due to their dependence on properties of classical logic not shared by most of the logics under consideration. One major contribution of this thesis is to reformulate and abstract some of these classical techniques to facilitate their application to a wider class of mathematical logics. We begin with Bibel's Connection Calculus: a matrix proof method for classical logic comparable in efficiency with most machine orientated proof methods for that logic. We reformulate this method to support its decomposition into a collection of individual techniques for improving the efficiency of proof search within a standard cut-free sequent calculus for classical logic. Each technique is presented as a means of alleviating a particular form of redundancy manifest within sequent-based proof search. One important result that arises from this anaylsis is an appreciation of the role of unification as a tool for removing certain proof-theoretic complexities of specific sequent rules; in the case of classical logic: the interaction of the quantifier rules. All of the non-classical logics under consideration admit complete sequent calculi. We anaylse the search spaces induced by these sequent proof systems and apply the techniques identified previously to remove specific redundancies found therein. Significantly, our proof-theoretic analysis of the role of unification renders it useful even within the propositional fragments of modal and intuitionistic logic.

Systems code is almost universally written in the C programming language or a variant. C has a very low level of type and memory abstraction and formal reasoning about C systems code requires a memory model that is able to capture the semantics of C pointers and types. At the same time, proof-based verification demands abstraction, in particular from the aliasing and frame problems. In this thesis, we study the mechanisation of a series of models, from semantic to separation logic, for achieving this abstraction when performing interactive theorem-prover based verification of C systems code in higher- order logic. We do not commit common oversimplifications, but correctly deal with C's model of programming language values and the heap, while developing the ability to reason abstractly and efficiently. We validate our work by demonstrating that the models are applicable to real, security- and safety-critical code by formally verifying the memory allocator of the L4 microkernel. All formalisations and proofs have been developed and machine-checked in the Isabelle/HOL theorem prover.

Modal logics have found applications in many diferent contexts. For example, epistemic modal logics can be used to reason about security protocols, temporal modal logics can be used to reason about the correctness of distributed systems and propositional dynamic logic can reason about the correctness of programs. However, pure modal logic is expressively weak and cannot represent many interesting secondorder properties that are expressible, for example, in the μ-calculus. Here we investigate the extension of modal logics with propositional quantification modulo bisimulation (bisimulation quantification). We extend existing work on bisimulation quantified modal logic by considering the variety of logics that result by restricting the structures over which they are interpreted. We show this can be a natural extension of modal logic preserving the intuitions of both modal logic and propositional quantification. However, we also find cases where such intuitions are not preserved. We examine cases where the axioms of pure modal logic and propositional quantification are preserved and where bisimulation quantifiers preserve the decidability of modal logic. We translate a number of recent decidability results for monadic second-order logics into the context of bisimulation quantified modal logics, and show how these results can be used to generate a number of interesting bisimulation quantified modal logics.