Delayed Clause Construction

Delayed Clause Construction (DCC) is a method of improving the efficiency of automated theorem provers.

Used in the CARINE theorem prover, DCC is a stalling strategy that enhances a theorem prover's performance by reducing the work to construct clauses to a minimum. Instead of constructing every conclusion (clause) of an applied inference rule, the information to construct such clause is temporarily stored until the theorem prover decides to either discard the clause or construct it. If the theorem prover decides to keep the clause, it will be constructed and stored in memory, otherwise the information to construct the clause is erased. Storing the information from which an inferred clause can be constructed require almost no additional CPU operations. However, constructing a clause may consume a lot of time. Some theorem provers spend 30%-40% of their total execution time constructing and deleting clauses. With DCC this wasted time can be salvaged.

DCC is useful when too many intermediate clauses (especially first-order clauses) are being constructed and discarded in a short period of time because the operations performed to construct such short lived clauses are avoided. DCC may not be very effective on theorems with only propositional clauses.