Proof Hints

Introduction

This document does NOT provide a way to avoid doing interactive proofs or pointing out the weakness of existing provers. Rather this document shows how to use information from doing interactive proofs to improve the clarity of models. As a consequence of these improvement, the obligations can be discharged automatically. We call these added information to the model "proof hints".

This concept of "proof hints" already exists in the form of "witness" or "theorem" in Event-B. These useful features are designed not only to help with proving the correctness of the model but also to give more information about the particular model.

The question is how we can decide which "features" are useful to have in the model. In principle we can go to the extreme and include the whole proof strategy into the model in order to be able to have it being discharged automatically. But this is undesirable since it will make the model difficult to understand. Having taken this into account we specify our criteria here for "proof hints".

1. It should help to understand the model better.

2. It should improve the automatic proving rate of the model.

In fact, we regard the first criterion as more important whereas the second criterion can be considered as a bonus for improving the clarity of the model. Below are our proposal for two kinds of proof hints: hypothesis selection and proof by cases.

Proof Hints

The presentation for each kind of proof hints is as follows:

1. Description: A brief description of the proof hints with the situation where this can be helpful.

2. Example: an example in Event-B is presented.

3. Work around: we show a solution (rather a work-around) for the current RODIN Platform.

Hypothesis Selection

Description In order to discharge the proof obligation, the developer just selects some hypotheses then invoke either AtelierB P0 or newPP restricted to finish these proofs. The solution is to (somehow) give "hints" to the Proof Obligation Generator (POG) to select these hypotheses automatically when generating the corresponding proof obligation.

Example Consider the following Event-B model

Consider the proof obligation set/hypSel0_1/INV which states that the event set maintains invariant hypSel0_1 (Here $\ldots$ denotes the unselected hypotheses).

Any provers works with only the selected hypotheses cannot discharge the above proof olbligation since the hypothesis $x \neq 0 \limp y \in \nat$ is missing. The obligation with the appropriate hypothesis selection is as follows

Workaround TODO

Proposal TODO

Case distinction

Description This section discuss about a proof hint related to the case where a developer has to do a manual "proof by case", after that, all branches of the proofs are discharged either by ML or AtelierB P0. The solution is to (somehow) give "hints" to the POG to generate different proof obligations for each case separately. Proving by cases are usually not done automatically since this splits the proof tree which could lead to blows up in terms of the number of cases.

Example TODO

Workaround TODO

Proposal TODO