Shortening of Proof Length is Elusive for Theorem Provers

There are many examples of failed strategies whose intention is to optimize a process but instead they produce worse results than no strategy at all. Many fall under the loose umbrella of the “no free lunch theorem”. In this paper we present an example in which a simple (but assumedly naive) strategy intended to shorten proof lengths in the propositional calculus produces results that are significantly worse than those achieved without any method to try to shorten proofs.This contrast with what was to be expected intuitively, namely no improvement in the length of the proofs. Another surprising result is how early the naive strategy failed. We set up a experiment in which we sample random classical propositional theorems and then feed them to two very popular automatic theorem provers (AProS and Prover9). We then compared the length of the proofs obtained under two methods: (1) the application of the theorem provers with no additional information; (2) the addition of new (redundant) axioms to the provers. The second method produced even longer proofs than the first one.