HR to TPTP

Abstract

Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) researchers who always use the same problems for testing their systems, run the risk of producing systems that can solve only those problems, and are weak on new problems or applications. Furthermore, as the state-of-the-art in ATP progresses, existing test problems become too easy, and testing on them provides little useful information. It is thus important to regularly find new and harder problems for testing ATP systems. HR is a program that performs automated theory formation in mathematical domains, such as group theory, quasigroup theory, and ring theory. Given the axioms of the domain, HR invents concepts, finds examples of them using a model generator, and makes conjectures empirically about the concepts. HR has been used to discover new group theory theorems of sufficient difficulty to be included in the TPTP - the standard library of test problems for first order ATP systems. As HR produces tens of thousands of distinct theorems, there has also been an opportunity to determine some characteristics that can be used to identify hard problems.