A Tough Nut for Mathematical Knowledge Management.pdf

A Tough Nut for Mathematical Knowledge Management Manfred Kerber1 and Martin Pollet2 1 School of Computer Science The University of Birmingham Birmingham B15 2TT, England http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mmk 2 Fachbereich Informatik Universita?t des Saarlandes 66041 Saarbru?cken, Germany http://www.ags.uni-sb.de/~pollet Abstract. In this contribution we address two related questions. Firstly, we want to shed light on the question how to use a representation for- malism to represent a given problem. Secondly, we want to find out how different formalizations are related and in particular how it is possible to check that one formalization entails another. The latter question is a tough nut for mathematical knowledge management systems, since it amounts to the question, how a system can recognize that a solution to a problem is already available, although possibly in disguise. As our starting point we take McCarthy’s 1964 mutilated checkerboard chal- lenge problem for proof procedures and compare some of its different formalizations. 1 Introduction Mathematical colloquial language as well as languages of formalized mathemat- ics offer a large variety of ways to formalize a problem. If a problem is given in an informal way, the first question is, how to formalize it, that is, how to write it down. While this is already the first question in a mathematical ver- nacular as well, it is more acute in a formal system, be it a proof development environment, or a mathematical knowledge representation system. Even within one such formal system, it is typically possible to represent the same problem in a large variety of ways. The adequacy of a representation depends of course on its intended purpose (e.g., information retrieval, tutoring system, automated problem solving). In this contribution we focus mainly on the representation of a problem in order to find a proof. The obvious question is then, which represen- tations are appropriate and which ones not. The choice of a good formali