MACE2(1)						      General Commands Manual							  MACE2(1)

NAME

       mace2 - searches for finite countermodels of first-order statements

SYNOPSIS

       mace2 [options] < input-file > output-file

DESCRIPTION

       This manual page documents briefly the mace2 command.

       mace2  is  a program that searches for finite models of first-order statements. The statement to be modeled is first translated to clauses,
       then to relational clauses; finally for the given domain size, the ground instances are constructed. A Davis-Putnam-Loveland-Logeman proce-
       dure decides the propositional problem, and any models found are translated to first-order models. mace2 is a useful complement to the the-
       orem prover otter(1), with otter searching for proofs and mace2 looking for countermodels.

OPTIONS

       A summary of options is included below.

       -n n   This gives the starting domain size for the search. The default value is 2. If you also give an -N option, MACE will iterate  domain
	      sizes up through the -N value. Otherwise, mace2 will search only for the -n value.

       -N n   This gives the ending domain size for the search. The default is the value of the -n option.

       -c     This  says  that constants in the input should be assigned unique elements of the domain. If the number of constants in the input is
	      greater than the domain size n, the first n constants are given values, and the rest are unconstrained.  This  is  a  useful  option
	      because it eliminates lots of isomorphism from the search. But it can block all models, especially when used with other constraints.

       -p     This option tells mace2 to print models in a nice tabular form as they are found. This format is meant for human consumption.

       -P     This  option  tells  mace2  to print models in an easily parsable form. This format has an otter-like syntax and can be read by most
	      Prolog systems.

       -I     This option tells mace2 to print models in IVY form. This format is a Lisp S-expression and is meant to be read by  IVY,	our  proof
	      and model checker.

       -m n   This tells mace2 to stop after finding n models. The default is 1.

       -t n   This  tells  mace2  to  stop after about n seconds. The default is unlimited. mace2 ignores any assign(max_seconds, n) commands that
	      might be in the input file. Such commands are used by otter only.

       -k n   This tells mace2 to stop if it tries to allocate more than n kilobytes of memory. The default is 48000 (about 48 megabytes).   mace2
	      ignores any assign(max_mem, n) commands that might be in the input file. Such commands are used by otter only.

       -x     This is a special-purpose constraint designed to reduce isomorphism in quasigroup problems. It applies only to binary function f.

       -h     This tells mace2 to print a summary of these command-line options.

SEE ALSO

       anldp(1), formed(1), otter(1), pl(1).
       Full documentation for mace2 is found in /usr/share/doc/mace2/mace2.{html,ps.gz}.

AUTHOR

       mace2 ws written by William McCune <otter@mcs.anl.gov>

       This manual page was written by Peter Collingbourne <pcc03@doc.ic.ac.uk>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).

								 November  5, 2006							  MACE2(1)