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Ergo 6: A Generic Proof Engine that Uses Prolog Proof Technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2010

Mark Utting ,
Peter Robinson  and
Ray Nickson
Mark Utting
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, The University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand, marku@cs.waikato.ac.nz
Peter Robinson
Affiliation:
Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia, pjr@itee.uq.edu.au
Ray Nickson
Affiliation:
School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand, Ray.Nickson@mcs.vuw.ac.nz

Abstract

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To support formal reasoning in mathematical and software engineering applications, it is desirable to have a generic prover that can be instantiated with a range of logics. This allows the prover to be applied to a wider variety of reasoning tasks than a fixed-logic prover. This paper describes the design principles and the architecture of the latest version of the Ergo proof engine, Ergo 6. Ergo 6 is a generic interactive theorem prover, similar to Isabelle, but with better support for proving schematic theorems with user-defined constraints, and with a different approach to handling variable scoping. A major theme of the paper is that Prolog implementation technology can be generalized to obtain efficient implementations of generic proof engines. This is demonstrated via a Qu-Prolog implementation of Ergo 6.

Type
Research Article
Information
LMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics , Volume 5 , 2002 , pp. 194 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © London Mathematical Society 2002

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