The problem of finding a restriction strategy more effective than the set of support strategy

This article is the seventeenth of a series of articles discussing various open research problems in automated reasoning. Here we focus on formulating a new restriction strategy for curtailing the number of clauses generated and retained during the completion of an assignment. The problem proposed for research asks one to find a strategy that sharply restricts the tendency of an automated reasoning program to deduce far too many conclusions, many of which are redundant or irrelevant. The new strategy must be more powerful than the set of support strategy on a substantial set of problems. We suggest possible test problems from Tarskian geometry and the equivalential calculus for evaluating a proposed solution to this research problem.This work was supported by the Applied Mathematical Sciences subprogram of the Office of Energy Research, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract W-31-109-Eng-38.