Guiding Equational Proofs by Attribute Functions

Abstract

This report presents a methodology to guide equational reasoning in a goal directed way. Suggested by rippling methods developed in the field of inductive theorem proving we use attributes of terms and heuristics to determine bridge lemmas, i.e. lemmas which have to be used during the proof of the theorem. Once we have found such a bridge lemma we use the techniques of difference unification and rippling to enable its use.