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A Combinatorial Testing Framework for Intuitionistic Propositional Theorem Provers

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Book cover Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL 2019)

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Abstract

Proving a theorem in intuitionistic propositional logic, with implication as its single connective, is known as one of the simplest to state PSPACE-complete problem. At the same time, via the Curry-Howard isomorphism, it is instrumental to find lambda terms that may inhabit a given type.

However, as hundreds of papers witness it, all starting with Gentzen’s LJ calculus, conceptual simplicity has not come in this case with comparable computational counterparts. Implementing such theorem provers faces challenges related not only to soundness and completeness but also too termination and scalability problems.

In search for an efficient but minimalist theorem prover, on the two sides of the Curry-Howard isomorphism, we design a combinatorial testing framework using types inferred for lambda terms as well as all-term and random term generators.

We choose Prolog as our meta-language. Being derived from essentially the same formalisms as those we are covering, it reduces the semantic gap and results in surprisingly concise and efficient declarative implementations. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/ptarau/TypesAndProofs.

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Acknowledgement

This research has been supported by NSF grant 1423324. We thank the reviewers of PADL’19 for their constructive comments and suggestions for improvement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas, Denton, USA

    Paul Tarau

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  1. Paul Tarau
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Correspondence to Paul Tarau .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    José Júlio Alferes

  2. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Moa Johansson

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Tarau, P. (2019). A Combinatorial Testing Framework for Intuitionistic Propositional Theorem Provers. In: Alferes, J., Johansson, M. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11372. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05998-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05998-9_8

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