Evolving Combinators

One of the many abilities that distinguish a mathematician from an auto-mated deduction system is to be able to offer appropriate expressions based onintuition and experience that are substituted for existentially quantified variablesso as to simplify the problem at hand substantially. We propose to simulate thisability with a technique called genetic programming for use in automated deduc-tion. We apply this approach to problems of combinatory logic. Our experimen-tal results show that the approach is viable and actually produces very promisingresults. A comparison with the renowned theorem prover Otter underlines theachievements.This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)