Automated Reasoning in Normative Detachment Structures with Ideal Conditions

Systems of deontic logic suffer either from being too expressive and therefore hard to mechanize, or from being too simple to capture relevant aspects of normative reasoning. In this article we look for a suitable way in between: the automation of a simple logic of normative ideality and sub-ideality that is not affected by many deontic paradoxes and that is expressive enough to capture contrary-to-duty reason- ing. We show that this logic is very useful to reason on normative scenarios from which one can extract a certain kind of argumentative structure, called a Normative Detachment Structure with Ideal Conditions. The theoretical analysis of the logic is accompanied by examples of automated reasoning on a concrete legal text

Towards Deciding Second-order Unification Problems Using Regular Tree Automata

International audienceThe second-order unification problem is undecidable [5]. While unification procedures, like Huet's pre-unification, terminate with success on unifiable problems, they might not terminate on non-unifiable ones. There are several decidability results for unification problems with infinitely-many pre-unifiers, such as for monadic second-order problems [3]. These results are based on the regular structure of the solutions of these problems and by computing minimal unifiers. Beyond the importance of the knowledge that searching for unifiers of decidable problems always terminates, one can also use this information in order to optimize unification algorithms, such as in the case for pattern unification [10]. Nevertheless, being able to prove that the unification problem of a certain class of unification constraints is decidable is far from easy. Some results were obtained for certain syntactic restrictions on the problems (see Levy [8] for some results and references) or on the unifiers (see Schmidt-Schauß [11], Schmidt-Schauß and Schulz [12, 13] and Je˙ z [7] for some results). Infinitary unification problems, like the ones we are considering, might suggest that known tools for dealing with the infinite might be useful. One such tool is the regular tree automaton. The drawback of using regular automata for unification is, of course, their inability to deal with variables. In this paper we try to overcome this obstacle and describe an ongoing work about using regular tree automata [1] in order to decide more general second-order unification problems. The second-order unification problems we will consider are of the form λz n .x 0 t. = λz n .C(x 0 s) where C is a non-empty context [2] and x 0 does not occur in t or s. We will call such problems cyclic problems. An important result in second-order unification was obtained by Ganzinger et al. [4] and stated that second-order unification is undecidable already when there is only one second-order variable occurring twice. The unification problem they used for proving the undecidability result was an instance of the following cyclic problem. Note that we chose to use in the definition only unary second-order variables but that this restriction should not be essential. x 0 (w 1 , g(y 1 , a)) = g(y 2 , x 0 (w 2 , a)) (1) Our decidability result is obtained by posing one further restriction over cyclic problems which is based on the existence and location of variables other than the cyclic one. A sufficient condition for the decidability of second-order unification problems was given by Levy [8]. This condition states that if we can never encounter, when applying Huet's pre-unification procedure [6] to a problem, a cyclic equation, then the procedure terminates. It follows from this result that deciding second-order unification problems depends on the ability to decide cyclic problems. The rules of Huet's procedure (PUA) are given in Fig. 1. Imitation partial bindings and projection partial bindings are defined in [14] and are denoted, respectively, by PB(f, α) and PB(i, α) where α is a type, Σ a signature f ∈ Σ and i > 0

Creating Artificial Ice States Using Vortices in Nanostructured Superconductors

We demonstrate that it is possible to realize vortex ice states that are analogous to square and kagome ice. With numerical simulations, we show that the system can be brought into a state that obeys either global or local ice rules by applying an external current according to an annealing protocol. We explore the breakdown of the ice rules due to disorder in the nanostructure array and show that in square ice, topological defects appear along grain boundaries, while in kagome ice, individual defects appear. We argue that the vortex system offers significant advantages over other artificial ice systems.Comment: 4 pages, 4 postscript figures; version to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

Certification of Prefixed Tableau Proofs for Modal Logic

International audienceDifferent theorem provers tend to produce proof objects in different formats and this is especially the case for modal logics, where several deductive formalisms (and provers based on them) have been presented. This work falls within the general project of establishing a common specification language in order to certify proofs given in a wide range of deductive formalisms. In particular, by using a translation from the modal language into a first-order polarized language and a checker whose small kernel is based on a classical focused sequent calculus, we are able to certify modal proofs given in labeled sequent calculi, prefixed tableaux and free-variable prefixed tableaux. We describe the general method for the logic K, present its implementation in a Prolog-like language, provide some examples and discuss how to extend the approach to other normal modal logics

Functions-as-Constructors Higher-Order Unification

Unification is a central operation in the construction of a range of computational logic systems based on first-order and higher-order logics. First-order unification has a number of properties that dominates the way it is incorporated within such systems. In particular, first-order unification is decidable, unary, and can be performed on untyped term structures. None of these three properties hold for full higher-order unification: unification is undecidable, unifiers can be incomparable, and term-level typing can dominate the search for unifiers. The so-called pattern subset of higher-order unification was designed to be a small extension to first-order unification that respected the basic laws governing lambda-binding (the equalities of alpha, beta, and eta-conversion) but which also satisfied those three properties. While the pattern fragment of higher-order unification has been popular in various implemented systems and in various theoretical considerations, it is too weak for a number of applications. In this paper, we define an extension of pattern unification that is motivated by some existing applications and which satisfies these three properties. The main idea behind this extension is that the arguments to a higher-order, free variable can be more than just distinct bound variables: they can also be terms constructed from (sufficient numbers of) such variables using term constructors and where no argument is a subterm of any other argument. We show that this extension to pattern unification satisfies the three properties mentioned above

Defining the meaning of TPTP formatted proofs

International audienceThe TPTP library is one of the leading problem libraries in the automated theorem proving community. Over time, support was added for problems beyond those in first-order clausal form. TPTP has also been augmented with support for various proof formats output by theorem provers. Such proofs can also be maintained in the TSTP proof library. In this paper we propose an extension of this framework to support the semantic specification of the inference rules used in proofs