System Description: The MathWeb Software Bus for Distributed Mathematical Reasoning

Abstract

Automated reasoning systems have reached a high degree of maturity in the last decade. Many reasoning tasks can be delegated to an automated theorem prover (ATP) by encoding them into its interface logic, simply calling the system and waiting for a proof, which will arrive in less than a second in most cases. Despite this seemingly ideal situation, ATPs are seldom actually used by people other than their own developers. The reasons for this seem to be that it is difficult for practitioners of other fields to find information about theorem prover software, to decide which system is best suited for the problem at hand, installing it, and coping with the often idiosyncratic concrete input syntax. Of course, not only potential outside users face these problems, so that, more often than not, existing reasoning procedures are re-implemented instead of re-used.