On the Relative Merits of Path Dissolution and the Method of Analytic Tableaux

Path dissolution is an inferencing mechanism that generalizes the method of analytic tableaux. We present several results demonstrating that tableau deductions can be substantially speeded up with applications of dissolution technology. We also consider the class of formulas on which the method of analytic tableaux was first shown to be intractable and prove that, with the application of the ordinary distributive law, standard tableau methods admit linear time proofs for this class.

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