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Reviewed Work(s): A Computing Procedure for Quantification Theory by Martin Davis and
Hilary Putnam
Review by: J. A. Robinson
Source: The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Mar., 1966), pp. 125-126
Published by: Association for Symbolic Logic
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2270653
Accessed: 23-04-2018 20:28 UTC
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REVIEWS 125
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126 REVIEWS
ever, this achieves only a small improvement in the overall procedure, since the same
exhaustive S-chain philosophy is followed here also.
Item (2) is a matter of extra convenience but not an essential advance on Gilmore's
procedure, since function symbols can always be paraphrased away in favor of pred-
icate symbols.
Item (3) means that in the Davis-Putnam procedure the prefix of S can be assumed
to consist entirely of universal quantifiers, and that S-chains are grown entirely by
universal instantiation. The individual constants may now be compounded from
function symbols, with individual constants as arguments, to any level. The level of
a constant is now one higher than the highest level of any of its immediate arguments,
with uncompounded constants having level 0.
The procedure, as in the case of Gilmore, consists of generating, given S, the suc-
cessive quantifier-free sentences of an exhaustive complete S-chain, and consequently
the shortest closed S-chain, for an unsatisfiable S of level L, will have a length that is
of the same order as that which Gilmore's procedure calls for.
Davis and Putnam argue (pp. 207, 208) that "the crucial difficulty" in designing
procedures of this kind is in getting an efficient scheme (such as theirs) for testing
quantifier-free sentences for satisfiability. In fact this is not really very crucial at
all when exhaustive S-chains are used, since no satisfiability test, however efficient,
is of any use if one cannot ever reach the point in the overall calculation when the
test will be applied to a closed chain. The crucial difficulty is surely thst exhibited
by the exponential growth of the number of instantiations. J. A. ROBINSON
DAG PRAWITZ, HAKON PRAWITZ, and NERI VOGHERA. A mechanical proof procedure
and its realization in an electronic computer. Ibid., pp. 102-128.
The procedure described in this paper was programmed for the Swedish computer
FACIT EDB and applied to a collection of very simple sentences. It differs from the
Gilmore-Davis-Putnam procedures mainly in being essentially a realization of Beth's
semantic tableau construction: consequently it is directly applicable to any sentence
S of quantification theory, without the need for any normalization. However, the
spirit of the procedure is wholly similar; in particular it is exhaustive in its universal
instantiation: one instantiates a sentence with a constant P1 only if one has instantiated
all sentences present at that stage with P1, ..., Pjj_. Indeed this is pointed out
by the authors themselves (p. 123) as the fundamental limitation on the procedure,
and they announce work in progress to develop a more efficient method. Such a method
was in fact soon published by Dag Prawitz in the paper reviewed below.
J. A. ROBINSON
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