Please enable Javascript in your browser to view Slate interactives. Today's puzzle is an 11x11 grid. Read about it in Slate: In 2023, Heather Tal Murphy wrote about her epic, embarrassing, shockingly successful ploy to get her friend a date using A.I. Get Slate Games in your inbox every weekday. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. You're already subscribed to the Slate Games newsletter.

'A 25-hour story that just about makes sense' Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2. 'A 25-hour story that just about makes sense' Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2. Y ou are an ancient and powerful vampire, and you wake up in the basement of some decrepit Seattle building, with no recent memories and a strange sigil on your hand. The first thing you do is feed on the cop who finds you, before smacking his partner into a wall so hard that his blood spatters the brick. A violent fanged rampage ensues, where you beat up and tear apart rival undead and their ghouls while currying the favour of the local court of vampires, and trying to keep your existence hidden from the mortal populace of this sultry city. But this is also a detective story: there's a younger night-stalker sharing your brain, a voice in your head named Fabian, who talks like a 1920s gumshoe (presumably because he once was one). Fabian isn't violent at all; he evidently works with the human police and the vampire underworld, snacking on consenting volunteers' blood and using his mind-delving powers to solve murders.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has been delayed again. Publisher Paradox Interactive announced today that it is now targeting release in October 2025 instead of the first half of this year. "Paradox Interactive and The Chinese Room are committed to delivering this game, and we believe that ensuring great technical quality is more important than sticking to a specific date," the company said. Creating the sequel has been a trial of endurance that would test even an immortal undead's patience. Paradox parted ways with the game's original developer, Hardsuit Labs, in 2021.

Clause selection is arguably the most important choice point in saturation-based theorem proving. Framing it as a reinforcement learning (RL) task is a way to challenge the human-designed heuristics of state-of-the-art provers and to instead automatically evolve -- just from prover experiences -- their potentially optimal replacement. In this work, we present a neural network architecture for scoring clauses for clause selection that is powerful yet efficient to evaluate. Following RL principles to make design decisions, we integrate the network into the Vampire theorem prover and train it from successful proof attempts. An experiment on the diverse TPTP benchmark finds the neurally guided prover improve over a baseline strategy, from which it initially learns--in terms of the number of in-training-unseen problems solved under a practically relevant, short CPU instruction limit--by 20%.

Large language models (LLMs) have generated significant attention since their inception, finding applications across various academic and industrial domains. However, these models often suffer from the "hallucination problem", where outputs, though grammatically and logically coherent, lack factual accuracy or are entirely fabricated. A particularly troubling issue discovered and widely discussed recently is the numerical comparison error where multiple LLMs incorrectly infer that "9.11$>$9.9". We discovered that the order in which LLMs generate answers and reasoning impacts their consistency. Specifically, results vary significantly when an LLM generates an answer first and then provides the reasoning versus generating the reasoning process first and then the conclusion. Inspired by this, we propose a new benchmark method for assessing LLM consistency: comparing responses generated through these two different approaches. This benchmark effectively identifies instances where LLMs fabricate answers and subsequently generate justifications. Furthermore, we introduce a novel and straightforward prompt strategy designed to mitigate this issue. Experimental results demonstrate that this strategy improves performance across various LLMs compared to direct questioning. This work not only sheds light on a critical flaw in LLMs but also offers a practical solution to enhance their reliability.

To achieve the best performance, automatic theorem provers often rely on schedules of diverse proving strategies to be tried out (either sequentially or in parallel) on a given problem. In this paper, we report on a large-scale experiment with discovering strategies for the Vampire prover, targeting the FOF fragment of the TPTP library and constructing a schedule for it, based on the ideas of Andrei Voronkov's system Spider. We examine the process from various angles, discuss the difficulty (or ease) of obtaining a strong Vampire schedule for the CASC competition, and establish how well a schedule can be expected to generalize to unseen problems and what factors influence this property.

With the increase in industrial applications using Answer Set Programming, the need for formal verification tools, particularly for critical applications, has also increased. During the program optimisation process, it would be desirable to have a tool which can automatically verify whether an optimised subprogram can replace the original subprogram. Formally this corresponds to the problem of verifying the strong equivalence of two programs. In order to do so, the translation tool anthem was developed. It can be used in conjunction with an automated theorem prover for classical logic to verify that two programs are strongly equivalent. With the current version of anthem, only the strong equivalence of positive programs with a restricted input language can be verified. This is a result of the translation $\tau^*$ implemented in anthem that produces formulas in the logic of here-and-there, which coincides with classical logic only for positive programs. This thesis extends anthem in order to overcome these limitations. First, the transformation $\sigma^*$ is presented, which transforms formulas from the logic of here-and-there to classical logic. A theorem formalises how $\sigma^*$ can be used to express equivalence in the logic of here-and-there in classical logic. Second, the translation $\tau^*$ is extended to programs containing pools. Another theorem shows how $\sigma^*$ can be combined with $\tau^*$ to express the strong equivalence of two programs in classical logic. With $\sigma^*$ and the extended $\tau^*$, it is possible to express the strong equivalence of logic programs containing negation, simple choices, and pools. Both the extended $\tau^*$ and $\sigma^*$ are implemented in a new version of anthem. Several examples of logic programs containing pools, negation, and simple choice rules, which the new version of anthem can translate to classical logic, are presented. Some a...

This work describes a new version of a previously published Python package -- gym-saturation: a collection of OpenAI Gym environments for guiding saturation-style provers based on the given clause algorithm with reinforcement learning. We contribute usage examples with two different provers: Vampire and iProver. We also have decoupled the proof state representation from reinforcement learning per se and provided examples of using a known ast2vec Python code embedding model as a first-order logic representation. In addition, we demonstrate how environment wrappers can transform a prover into a problem similar to a multi-armed bandit. We applied two reinforcement learning algorithms (Thompson sampling and Proximal policy optimisation) implemented in Ray RLlib to show the ease of experimentation with the new release of our package.

Noting that lemmas are a key feature of mathematics, we engage in an investigation of the role of lemmas in automated theorem proving. The paper describes experiments with a combined system involving learning technology that generates useful lemmas for automated theorem provers, demonstrating improvement for several representative systems and solving a hard problem not solved by any system for twenty years. By focusing on condensed detachment problems we simplify the setting considerably, allowing us to get at the essence of lemmas and their role in proof search.

Using reinforcement learning for automated theorem proving has recently received much attention. Current approaches use representations of logical statements that often rely on the names used in these statements and, as a result, the models are generally not transferable from one domain to another. The size of these representations and whether to include the whole theory or part of it are other important decisions that affect the performance of these approaches as well as their runtime efficiency. In this paper, we present NIAGRA; an ensemble Name InvAriant Graph RepresentAtion. NIAGRA addresses this problem by using 1) improved Graph Neural Networks for learning name-invariant formula representations that is tailored for their unique characteristics and 2) an efficient ensemble approach for automated theorem proving. Our experimental evaluation shows state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets from different domains with improvements up to 10% compared to the best learning-based approaches. Furthermore, transfer learning experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms other learning-based approaches by up to 28%.