Special Issue on Automated Deduction

Abstract

A key problem in artificial intelligence is the question how to perform mathematical proofs automatically. This is not just a theoretical question, but it has numerous highly important practical applications. In particular, tools that perform automated deduction are used to verify software and hardware in safety-critical applications. For this reason, automated deduction has always been an important area within artificial intelligence. Articles on different aspects of automated deduction can be found in many issues of the KI Journal, but there have also been two special issues (in 1992 and 1998) devoted to the relationship of AI and logic and to automated deduction and its applications, respectively. These two issues also marked the beginning and the end of the DFG priority program “Deduction” which had a tremendous impact on the research in the field in Germany. The current special issue focuses on the research in automated deduction after 1998. This research can roughly be classified by the different logics under consideration. For propositional logic, the article by U. Egly and L. Haller describes SAT solving for non-clausal formulas and compares it with the more conventional SAT solving for formulas in conjunctive normal form. To apply automated deduction for knowledge representation, instead of propositional logic one usually regards specialized logics like description logics. The article of F. Baader, C. Lutz, and A.-Y. Turhan discusses the trend to new less expressive description logics