An Interactive Driver for Goal-directed Proof Strategies

Interactive Theorem Provers (ITPs) are tools meant to assist the user during the formal development of mathematics. Automatic proof searching procedures are a desirable aid, and most ITPs supply the user with an extensive set of facilities to improve automation. However, the black-box nature of most automatic procedure conflicts with the interactive nature of these tools: a newcomer running an automatic procedure learns nothing by its execution (especially in case of failure), and a trained user has no opportunities to interactively guide the procedure towards the solution, e.g. pruning wrong or not promising branches of the search tree. In this paper we discuss the implementation of the resolution based automatic procedure of the Matita ITP, explicitly conceived to be interactively driven by the user through a suitable, simple graphical interface.