Constraint Manipulation in SGGS

ABSTRACT. SGGS (Semantically-Guided Goal-Sensitive theorem proving) is a clausal theorem-proving method, with a seemingly rare combination of properties: it is first order, DPLL-style model based, semantically guided, goal sensitive, and proof confluent. SGGS works with constrained clauses, and uses a sequence of constrained clauses to represent a tentative model of the given set of clauses. A basic building block in SGGS inferences is splitting, which partitions a clause into clauses that have the same set of ground instances. Splitting introduces constraints and their manipulation, which is the subject of this paper.