Planning for Distributed Theorem Proving: The Teamwork Approach

This paper presents a new way to use planning in automated theorem proving by means of distribution. To overcome the problem that often subtasks for a proof problem can not be detected a priori (which prevents the use of the known planning and distribution techniques) we use a team of experts that work independently with diierent heuristics on the problem. After a certain amount of time referees judge their results using the impact of the results on the behaviour of the expert and a supervisor combines the selected results to a new starting point. This supervisor also selects the experts that can work on the problem in the next round. This selection is a reactive planning task. We outline which information the supervisor can use to fullll this task and how this information is processed to result in a plan or to revise a plan. We also show that the use of planning for the assignment of experts to the team allows the system to solve many diierent examples in an acceptable time with the same start connguration and without any consultation of the user.