Automated theory exploration for interactive theorem proving: An introduction to the hipster system

Paper in proceeding, 2017

Theory exploration is a technique for automatically discovering new interesting lemmas in a mathematical theory development using testing. In this paper I will present the theory exploration system Hipster, which automatically discovers and proves lemmas about a given set of datatypes and functions in Isabelle/HOL. The development of Hipster was originally motivated by attempts to provide a higher level of automation for proofs by induction. Automating inductive proofs is tricky, not least because they often need auxiliary lemmas which themselves need to be proved by induction. We found that many such basic lemmas can be discovered automatically by theory exploration, and importantly, quickly enough for use in conjunction with an interactive theorem prover without boring the user.