07401 Executive Summary – Deduction and Decision Procedures

Formal logic provides a mathematical foundation for many areas of computer science. Significant progress has been made in the challenge of making computers perform non-trivial logical reasoning. be it fully automatic, or in interaction with humans. In the last years it has become more and more evident that theory-specific reasoners, and in particular decision procedures, are extremely important in many applications of such deduction tools. General-purpose reasoning methods such as resolution or paramodulation alone are not efficient enough to handle the needs of real-world applications. % For this reason, the focus of this seminar was on decision procedures, their integration into general-purpose theorem provers, and the application of the integrated tools in computer science.