Ubuntu Manpage: cvc4, pcvc4 - an automated theorem prover

NAME

       cvc4, pcvc4 - an automated theorem prover

SYNOPSIS

       cvc4 [ options ] [ file ]

       pcvc4 [ options ] [ file ]

DESCRIPTION

       cvc4  is  an  automated  theorem  prover  for first-order formulas with respect to background theories of
       interest.  pcvc4 is CVC4's "portfolio" variant, which is capable of running multiple  CVC4  instances  in
       parallel, configured differently.

       With  file  , commands are read from file and executed.  CVC4 supports the SMT-LIB (versions 1.2 and 2.0)
       input format, as well as its own native “presentation language” (see cvc4(5) ), which is similar in  many
       respects to CVC3's presentation language, but not identical.

       If  file is unspecified, standard input is read (and the CVC4 presentation language is assumed).  If file
       is unspecified and CVC4 is connected to a terminal, interactive mode is assumed.

COMMON OPTIONS

       Each option marked with [*] has a --no-OPTIONNAME variant, which reverses the sense of the option.

              $

              $

       Each option marked with [*] has a --no-OPTIONNAME variant, which reverses the sense of the option.

DIAGNOSTICS

       CVC4 reports all syntactic and semantic errors on standard error.

HISTORY

The CVC4 effort is the culmination of fifteen years of theorem proving research, starting with the
Stanford Validity Checker (SVC) in 1996.

SVC's successor, the Cooperating Validity Checker (CVC), had a more optimized internal design, produced
proofs, used the Chaff SAT solver, and featured a number of usability enhancements. Its name comes from
the cooperative nature of decision procedures in Nelson-Oppen theory combination, which share amongst
each other equalities between shared terms.

CVC Lite, first made available in 2003, was a rewrite of CVC that attempted to make CVC more flexible
(hence the “lite”) while extending the feature set: CVCLite supported quantifiers where its predecessors
did not. CVC3 was a major overhaul of portions of CVC Lite: it added better decision procedure
implementations, added support for using MiniSat in the core, and had generally better performance.

CVC4 is the new version, the fifth generation of this validity checker line that is now celebrating
fifteen years of heritage. It represents a complete re-evaluation of the core architecture to be both
performant and to serve as a cutting-edge research vehicle for the next several years. Rather than
taking CVC3 and redesigning problem parts, we've taken a clean-room approach, starting from scratch.
Before using any designs from CVC3, we have thoroughly scrutinized, vetted, and updated them. Many parts
of CVC4 bear only a superficial resemblance, if any, to their correspondent in CVC3.

However, CVC4 is fundamentally similar to CVC3 and many other modern SMT solvers: it is a DPLL( T )
solver, with a SAT solver at its core and a delegation path to different decision procedure
implementations, each in charge of solving formulas in some background theory.

The re-evaluation and ground-up rewrite was necessitated, we felt, by the performance characteristics of
CVC3. CVC3 has many useful features, but some core aspects of the design led to high memory use, and the
use of heavyweight computation (where more nimble engineering approaches could suffice) makes CVC3 a much
slower prover than other tools. As these designs are central to CVC3, a new version was preferable to a
selective re-engineering, which would have ballooned in short order.

VERSION

       This manual page refers to CVC4 version CVC4_RELEASE_STRING.

BUGS

       An issue tracker for the CVC4 project is maintained at https://github.com/CVC4/CVC4/issues.

AUTHORS

       CVC4  is  developed  by a team of researchers at Stanford University and the University of Iowa.  See the
       AUTHORS file in the distribution for a full list of contributors.