An epistemic programming approach for automated theorem finding

Abstract

The problem of automated theorem finding is one of 33 basic research problems in automated reasoning which was originally proposed by Wos. The problem is still an open problem until now. Specific knowledge is the power of any scientist, therefore, if a scientist in a particular area takes part in the process of automated theorem finding, then the scientist should certainly make some contributions for automated theorem finding in the target area. Epistemic programming was proposed as a novel program paradigm to program epistemic processes of scientific discovery, which regards conditionals as the subject of computing, takes primary epistemic operations as basic operations of computing, and regards epistemic processes as the subject of programming. Epistemic programming provides not only programming means but also interactive means for scientists to control cognitive processes. This paper proposes an epistemic programming approach for automated theorem finding following the epistemic programming paradigm and shows some examples to do automated theorem finding by using the approach.