Multi-clause synergized contradiction separation based first-order theorem prover — MC-SCS

Abstract

After extending the term "contradiction" from the traditionally defined a complementary pair based on two clauses into a typical unsatisfiable clause set (i.e., a standard contradiction which might consist of more than two clauses), a recent work by the same author group proposes a new inference principle and its sound and complete first-order theory framework to escape from the existing static binary resolution into a dynamic Multi-Clause Synergized Contradiction Separation based inference rule, which is essentially different from the multi-ary resolution, but includes binary resolution as its special case. The corresponding first-order automated deduction system is called MC-SCS. This present work focuses on the MC-SCS's reasoning algorithm scheme, proof procedure, implementation, and experimental results. The empirical evaluation shows promising results compared with some state of art first-order theorem provers.