Section: Application Domains

Trustworthy implementations of theorem proving techniques

Instead of integrating different provers by exchanging proof evidence and relying on a back-end proof-checker, another approach to integration consists in re-implementing the theorem proving techniques as proof-search strategies, on an architecture that guarantees correctness. Focused systems can serve as the basis of such an architecture, identifying points of choice and backtrack and providing primitives for the exploration of the search space. These form a trusted Application Programming Interface that can be used to program and experiment various proof-search heuristics without worrying about correctness. No proof-checking is needed if one trusts the implementation of the API.

Following the description, in this framework, of quantifier-free techniques such as DPLL(T) [2] , we are now exploring how the architecture can be adapted to accommodate techniques that handle quantifiers. In particular, unification-based or triggers-based techniques  [37] , [49] .

This approach has led to the development of the Psyche engine.