INTRODUCTORY-CHALLENGE-PROBLEM-4.html -- ACL2 Version 6.3

### INTRODUCTORY-CHALLENGE-PROBLEM-4

challenge problem 4 for the new user of ACL2

    Major Section:  INTRODUCTION-TO-THE-THEOREM-PROVER

Start in a fresh ACL2, either by restarting your ACL2 image from scratch or executing `:ubt! 1`.

This problem is much more open ended than the preceding ones. The challenge is to define a function that collects exactly one copy of each element of a list and to prove that it returns a subset of the list with no duplications.

Hint: We recommend that you read this hint to align your function names with our solution, to make comparisons easier. Our answer is shown in see introductory-challenge-problem-4-answer. In that page you'll see a definition of a function `collect-once` and the proofs of two theorems:

    (defthm main-theorem-1-about-collect-once
      (subsetp (collect-once x) x))

    (defthm main-theorem-2-about-collect-once
      (not (dupsp (collect-once x))))

The function `dupsp` is as defined in see introductory-challenge-problem-3. This is quite easy.

Then, we define a tail-recursive version of the method based on the pseudo-code:

     a = nil;
     while (x not empty) {
      a = if (member (car x) a) then a else (cons (car x) a);
      x = (cdr x);
      }
     return a;

We formalize this with the function `while-loop-version`, where `(while-loop-version x nil)` is the ``semantics'' of the code above. I.e., the function `while-loop-version` captures the while loop in the pseudo-code above and returns the final value of `a`, and it should be invoked with the initial value of `a` being `nil`.

We prove `(while-loop-version x nil)` returns a subset of `x` that contains no duplications. Furthermore, we do it two ways: first ``indirectly'' by relating `while-loop-version` to `collect-once`, and second (``directly'') without using `collect-once`. Both of these proofs are much harder than the `collect-once` approach, involving about a dozen lemmas each.

Compare your solutions to ours at see introductory-challenge-problem-4-answer.

Then, use your browser's Back Button to return to introductory-challenges.