The Theorem Prover Museum -- Conserving the System Heritage of Automated Reasoning

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Theorem Prover Museum, an initiative to preserve and share the sources and artefacts of automated reasoning systems to safeguard the history and facilitate future research in AI and logic.

Contribution

It establishes a repository for theorem prover sources and artefacts, promoting preservation and accessibility of foundational AI systems for future study.

Findings

Creates a publicly accessible collection of theorem prover sources

Highlights the importance of preserving AI system heritage

Encourages future research and historical analysis

Abstract

We present the Theorem Prover Museum, and initiative to conserve -- and make publicly available -- the sources and source-related artefacts of automated reasoning systems. Theorem provers have been at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence, stretching the limits of computation, and incubating many innovations we take for granted today. Without the systems themselves as preserved cultural artefacts, future historians will have difficulties to study the history of science and engineering in our discipline.