Download PDFOpen PDF in browserBlocked Clauses in First-Order Logic18 pages•Published: May 4, 2017AbstractBlocked 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 whose elimination can improve the performance of modern theorem provers, especially on satisfiable problem instances.Keyphrases: automated reasoning, automated theorem proving, blocked clauses, clause elimination, first order logic, preprocessing, sat In: Thomas Eiter and David Sands (editors). LPAR-21. 21st International Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning, vol 46, pages 31-48.
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