Abstract
Circumscription is naturally expressed in second-order logic, but previous implementations all work by handling cases that can be reduced to first-order logic. Making use of a new second-order unification algorithm introduced in [3], we show how a theorem prover can be made to find proofs in second-order logic, in particular proofs by circumscription. We work out a blocks-world example in complete detail and give the output of an implementation, demonstrating that it works as claimed.
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References
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Beeson, M. (2001). A Second-Order Theorem Prover Applied to Circumscription. In: Goré, R., Leitsch, A., Nipkow, T. (eds) Automated Reasoning. IJCAR 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2083. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45744-5_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45744-5_23
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