Potential of General-Purpose Reasoning Assistant System EUODHILOS

Summary Much work has been done on special-purpose reasoning assistant systems whose underlying logics are fixed. In contrast with such a trend, this paper is devoted to a new dimension of computer-assisted reasoning research, that is, a general-purpose reasoning assistant system that aUows a user to defme his or her own logical system relevant for the objects in the problem domain and to reason about them. In the first half of the paper, the need, significance and design principle of EUODHLOS : a general-purpose system for computer-assisted reasoning, are discussed, then the system overview is described, placing emphases on the following three points: (1) formal system description language, (2) proving methodology based on several sheets for logical thought, (3) visual human-computer interface for reasoning. In the latter half, the potentials and usefulness of EUODHLOS are demonstrated through experiments and experiences of its use by a number of logics and proof examples therein, which have been used or devised in computer science, nificial inteMgence and so on. A