QUICK-AND-DIRTY-SUBSUMPTION-REPLACEMENT-STEP.html -- ACL2 Version 6.3

## QUICK-AND-DIRTY-SUBSUMPTION-REPLACEMENT-STEP

(advanced topic) controlling a heuristic in the prover's clausifier

    Major Section:  OTHER

This topic is probably only of interest to those who are undertaking particularly complex proof developments.

The ACL2 prover's handling of propositional logic uses a heuristic that we believe might cause the prover to slow down significantly or even to trigger a stack overflow. However, we believe these negative effects are only felt on very large formulas -- formulas that are likely to cause similar degradation of many other parts of ACL2.

The following two events turn off that heuristic (by eliminating calls to source function `quick-and-dirty-subsumption-replacement-step`, after which this documentation topic is named).

    (defun quick-and-dirty-srs-off (cl1 ac)
      (declare (ignore cl1 ac)
               (xargs :mode :logic :guard t))
      nil)

    (defattach quick-and-dirty-srs quick-and-dirty-srs-off)

However, if you feel the need to try this out, please remember that the proof is likely to fail anyway since other parts of ACL2 will probably be stressed. A more basic problem with your proof strategy may exist: the formulas are getting extraordinarily large. A common approach for avoiding such problem include disabling functions (see in-theory). Other less common approaches might help if you are sufficiently desperate, such as defining your own `IF` function to use in place of the built-in `IF`.

If you do find an example for which the above two events provide significant benefit, we (the ACL2 implementors) would be interested in hearing about it.

To turn the heuristic back on:

    (defattach quick-and-dirty-srs quick-and-dirty-srs-builtin)