An Outline of a Proposed System that Learns from Experts How to Discharge Proof Obligations Automatically

Abstract

Most formal methods give rise to proof obligations (POs) which are putative lemmas that need proof.Discharging these POs can become a bottleneck in the use of formal methods in practical applications.It is our aim to increase the repertoire of techniques for reducing this bottleneck by tackling learning from proof attempts.In many cases where a correct PO has not been discharged, an expert can easily see how to complete a proof.We believe that it would be acceptable to rely on such expert intervention to do one proof if this would enable a system to kill off others "of the same form"