Schemas play an important and versatile role in symbolic computation. For general problem solving, schemas can be used to capture and codify knowledge that represents recognised successful processes and solutions, which can be repeatedly used for constructing sub-processes with smaller search spaces for sub-solutions, and so on. In particular, they have made significant contributions to areas like theorem proving and program synthesis by formulating more efficient proof or synthesis strategies that are amenable to automation, and by producing better-engineered solutions overall. Nowadays, the most successful approaches to automation in these areas are schema-guided, and we believe that such approaches have the potential to be equally successful for automated reasoning and software engineering in general.
The aim of this special issue of the Journal of Symbolic Computation is to furnish a collection of seminal work on schemas in diverse areas of symbolic computation, with a view to encouraging future work and at the same time providing a sound starting point for it.
(Here is the original Call for Papers.)
Guest Editors
Pierre Flener, Uppsala University, Sweden
Kung-Kiu Lau, University of Manchester, UK
Wolfgang Bibel, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany