Future directions of automated deduction: Distributed automated deduction

Distributed automated deduction is concerned with the design and realization of strategies where multiple deductive processes work concurrently towards the solution of theorem-proving problems. These strategies are usually implemented in distributed environments, such as a network of computers, or a loosely coupled, asynchronous multiprocessor, where each deductive process runs on a node of the system. While this area has emerged in automated deduction only in the past few years, a complete survey of the work done so far is beyond the scope of this document. Two surveys are available in [4] and [11], and most approaches proposed since those surveys were written may be found in [6] or [7]. In the following we give first some motivation and introduction, then we focuse on a fundamental problem for future research, the design of techniques to partition the search space among cooperating concurrent processes.