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Ergo 6: A Generic Proof Engine that Uses Prolog Proof Technology
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Ergo 6: A Generic Proof Engine that Uses Prolog Proof Technology

Mark Utting, Peter Robinson and Ray Nickson
LMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics, Vol.5, pp.194-219
2002
url
https://doi.org/10.1112/S1461157000000759View
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Abstract

Computation Theory and Mathematics
To support formal reasoning in mathematical and software engineering applications, it is desirable to have a generic prover that can be instantiated with a range of logics. This allows the prover to be applied to a wider variety of reasoning tasks than a fixed-logic prover. This paper describes the design principles and the architecture of the latest version of the Ergo proof engine, Ergo 6. Ergo 6 is a generic interactive theorem prover, similar to Isabelle, but with better support for proving schematic theorems with user-defined constraints, and with a different approach to handling variable scoping. A major theme of the paper is that Prolog implementation technology can be generalized to obtain efficient implementations of generic proof engines. This is demonstrated via a Qu-Prolog implementation of Ergo 6.

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