Year: 2017
Type: preprint
Abstract: Blocked clauses provide the basis for powerful reasoning techniques used in SAT, QBF, and DQBF solving. Their definition, which relies on a simple syntactic criterion, guarantees that they are both redundant and easy to find. In this paper, we lift the notion of blocked clauses to first-order logic. We introduce two types of blocked clauses, one for first-order logic with equality and the other for first-order logic without equality, and prove their redundancy. In addition, we give a polynomial algorithm for checking whether a clause is blocked. Based on our new notions of blocking, we implemented a novel first-order preprocessing tool. Our experiments showed that many first-order problems in the TPTP library contain a large number of blocked clauses. Moreover, we observed that their elimination can improve the performance of modern theorem provers, especially on satisfiable problem instances.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institutions: TU Wien, Johannes Kepler University of Linz
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Austrian Science Fund
OpenAlex ID: W2951045139