Call subsumption mechanisms for tabled logic programs

Estágio realizado na ... e orientado pelo Eng.ºDocumento confidencial. Não pode ser disponibilizado para consultaTese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Beyond depth-first: improving tabled logic programs through alternative scheduling strategies

Journal ArticleTabled evaluations ensure termination of logic programs with fi nite models by keeping track of which subgoals have been called Given several variant subgoals in an evaluation, only the fi rst one encountered will use program clause resolution the rest uses answer resolution This use of answer resolution prevents infi nite looping which happens in SLD Given the asynchronicity of answer generation and answer return, tabling systems face an important scheduling choice not present in traditional top-down evaluation How does the order of returning answers to consuming subgoals affect program efficiency This paper investigates alternate scheduling strategies for tabling in a WAM implementation, the SLG-WAM. The original SLG-WAM had a simple mechanism of scheduling answers to be returned to callers which was expensive in terms of trailing and choice point creation We propose here a more sophisticated scheduling strategy, Batched Scheduling, which reduces the overheads of these operations and provides dramatic space reduction as well as speedups for many programs We also propose a second strategy, Local Scheduling, which has applications to non-monotonic reasoning and when combined with answer subsumption can improve the performance of some programs by arbitrary amounts

Beyond depth-first strategies: improving tabled logic programs through alternative scheduling

Journal ArticleTabled evaluation ensures termination for programs with finite models by keeping track of which subgoals have been called. Given several variant subgoals in an evaluation, only the fi rst one encountered will use program-clause resolution; the rest will resolve with the answers generated by the first subgoal. This use of answer resolution prevents infi nite looping that sometimes happens in SLD. Because answers that are produced in one path of the computation may be consumed, asynchronously, in others, tabling systems face an important scheduling choice not present in traditional top-down evaluation: when to schedule answer resolution. This paper investigates alternate scheduling strategies for tabling in a WAM implementation, the SLG-WAM. The original SLG-WAM had a simple mechanism for scheduling answer resolution that was expensive in terms of trailing and choice-point creation. We propose here a more sophisticated scheduling strategy, batched scheduling, which reduces the overheads of these operations and provides dramatic space reduction as well as speedups for many programs. We also propose a second strategy, local scheduling, which has applications to nonmonotonic reasoning, and when combined with answer subsumption, can arbitrarily improve the performance of some programs