Extending a High-Performance Prover to Higher-Order Logic

Abstract

Most users of proof assistants want more proof automation. Some proof assistants discharge goals by translating them to first-order logic and invoking an efficient prover on them, but much is lost in translation. Instead, we propose to extend first-order provers with native support for higher-order features. Building on our extension of E to $$\lambda $$ λ -free higher-order logic, we extend E to full higher-order logic. The result is the strongest prover on benchmarks exported from a proof assistant.