ProofWatch: Watchlist Guidance for Large Theories in E
This work addresses the challenge of efficient proof search in large formal mathematics libraries, representing an incremental advancement in theorem-proving automation.
The authors tackled the problem of improving automated theorem proving in large theories by developing watchlist-based guidance methods for the E ATP system, resulting in significant performance improvements over both standard and previously best evolutionary strategies on the Mizar library.
Watchlist (also hint list) is a mechanism that allows related proofs to guide a proof search for a new conjecture. This mechanism has been used with the Otter and Prover9 theorem provers, both for interactive formalizations and for human-assisted proving of open conjectures in small theories. In this work we explore the use of watchlists in large theories coming from first-order translations of large ITP libraries, aiming at improving hammer-style automation by smarter internal guidance of the ATP systems. In particular, we (i) design watchlist-based clause evaluation heuristics inside the E ATP system, and (ii) develop new proof guiding algorithms that load many previous proofs inside the ATP and focus the proof search using a dynamically updated notion of proof matching. The methods are evaluated on a large set of problems coming from the Mizar library, showing significant improvement of E's standard portfolio of strategies, and also of the previous best set of strategies invented for Mizar by evolutionary methods.