Interactive Visualization of Saturation Attempts in Vampire

Paper i proceeding, 2019

Many applications of formal methods require automated reasoning about system properties, such as system safety and security. To improve the performance of automated reasoning engines, such as SAT/SMT solvers and first-order theorem prover, it is necessary to understand both the successful and failing attempts of these engines towards producing formal certificates, such as logical proofs and/or models. Such an analysis is challenging due to the large number of logical formulas generated during proof/model search. In this paper we focus on saturation-based first-order theorem proving and introduce the SatVis tool for interactively visualizing saturation-based proof attempts in first-order theorem proving. We build SatVis on top of the world-leading theorem prover Vampire, by interactively visualizing the saturation attempts of Vampire in SatVis. Our work combines the automatic layout and visualization of the derivation graph induced by the saturation attempt with interactive transformations and search functionality. As a result, we are able to analyze and debug (failed) proof attempts of Vampire. Thanks to its interactive visualisation, we believe SatVis helps both experts and non-experts in theorem proving to understand first-order proofs and analyze/refine failing proof attempts of first-order provers.