Methods - The Basic Units for Planning and Verifying Proofs

  • This paper concerns a knowledge structure called method , within a compu-tational model for human oriented deduction. With human oriented theoremproving cast as an interleaving process of planning and verification, the body ofall methods reflects the reasoning repertoire of a reasoning system. While weadopt the general structure of methods introduced by Alan Bundy, we make anessential advancement in that we strictly separate the declarative knowledgefrom the procedural knowledge. This is achieved by postulating some stand-ard types of knowledge we have identified, such as inference rules, assertions,and proof schemata, together with corresponding knowledge interpreters. Ourapproach in effect changes the way deductive knowledge is encoded: A newcompound declarative knowledge structure, the proof schema, takes the placeof complicated procedures for modeling specific proof strategies. This change ofparadigm not only leads to representations easier to understand, it also enablesus modeling the even more important activity of formulating meta-methods,that is, operators that adapt existing methods to suit novel situations. In thispaper, we first introduce briefly the general framework for describing methods.Then we turn to several types of knowledge with their interpreters. Finally,we briefly illustrate some meta-methods.

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Metadaten
Author:Xiaorong Huang, Manfred Kerber, Michael Kohlhase
URN:urn:nbn:de:hbz:386-kluedo-3095
Series (Serial Number):SEKI Report (92,20)
Document Type:Preprint
Language of publication:English
Year of Completion:1999
Year of first Publication:1999
Publishing Institution:Technische Universität Kaiserslautern
Date of the Publication (Server):2000/04/03
Tag:Declarative and Procedural Knowledge; Deduction; Methods; Planning and Verification; Tactics
Faculties / Organisational entities:Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Informatik
DDC-Cassification:0 Allgemeines, Informatik, Informationswissenschaft / 004 Informatik
Licence (German):Standard gemäß KLUEDO-Leitlinien vor dem 27.05.2011