nanoCoP: A Non-clausal Connection Prover

Most of the popular efficient proof search calculi work on formulae that are in clausal form, i.e. in disjunctive or conjunctive normal form. Hence, most state-of-the-art fully automated theorem provers require a translation of the input formula into clausal form in a preprocessing step. Translating a proof in clausal form back into a more readable non-clausal proof of the original formula is not straightforward. This paper presents a non-clausal theorem prover for classical first-order logic. It is based on a non-clausal connection calculus and implemented with a few lines of Prolog code. By working entirely on the original structure of the input formula, the resulting non-clausal proofs are not only shorter, but can also be more easily translated into, e.g., sequent proofs. Furthermore, a non-clausal proof search is more suitable for some non-classical logics.