Automated mathematical induction

Projet EURECAProofs by induction are important in many computer science and artifical intelligence applications, in particular, in program verification and specification systems. We present a new method to prove (and disprove) automatically inductives properties. Given a set of axioms, a well-suited induction scheme is constructed automatically. We call such and induction scheme a test set. Then, for proving a property, we just instantiate it with terms from the test set and apply pure algebraic simplifications to the result. This method needs no completion and explicit induction. However it retains their positive features, namely, the completeness of the former and the robustness of the latter. It has been implemented in the theorem-prover SPIKE