Automated Reasoning - Early Years

Early Years

The development of formal logic played a big role in the field of automated reasoning which itself led to the development of Artificial Intelligence. A formal proof is a proof in which every logical inference has been checked all the way back to the fundamental axioms of mathematics. All the intermediate logical steps are supplied, without exception. No appeal is made to intuition, even if the translation from intuition to logic is routine. Thus, a formal proof is less intuitive, and less susceptible to logical errors.

Some consider the Cornell Summer meeting of 1957, which brought together a large number of logicians and computer scientists, as the origin of automated reasoning, or automated deduction. Others say that it began before that with the 1955 Logic Theorist program of Newell, Shaw and Simon, or with Martin Davis’ 1954 implementation of Presburger’s decision procedure (which proved that the sum of two even numbers is even). Automated reasoning, although a significant and popular area of research, went through an "AI winter" in the eighties and early nineties. Luckily, it got revived after that. For example, in 2005, Microsoft started using verification technology in many of their internal projects and is planning to include a logical specification and checking language in their 2012 version of Visual C.