A Two-Watched Literal Scheme for First-Order Logic
This work provides a more efficient inference mechanism for first-order logic theorem provers and reasoning systems.
The paper extends the two-watched literal scheme from propositional to first-order logic, enabling efficient detection of propagating and false clauses. The implementation outperforms a standard dynamic programming approach, particularly for long clauses.
The two-watched literal scheme, a core component of efficient CDCL (Conflict-Driven Clause Learning) implementations for propositional logic, is extended to first-order logic. Given a set of first-order clauses and a set of ground literals, our lifted two-watched literal scheme efficiently detects all propagating and false clauses with respect to the ground literals. We present the algorithm as a system of rules and prove its soundness and completeness. Additionally, we provide an implementation of the two-watched literal scheme, which outperforms a standard dynamic programming approach for detecting propagatable literals and conflicts, especially when dealing with long clauses.