3,847 research outputs found
The Design of the Fifth Answer Set Programming Competition
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established paradigm of declarative
programming that has been developed in the field of logic programming and
nonmonotonic reasoning. Advances in ASP solving technology are customarily
assessed in competition events, as it happens for other closely-related
problem-solving technologies like SAT/SMT, QBF, Planning and Scheduling. ASP
Competitions are (usually) biennial events; however, the Fifth ASP Competition
departs from tradition, in order to join the FLoC Olympic Games at the Vienna
Summer of Logic 2014, which is expected to be the largest event in the history
of logic. This edition of the ASP Competition series is jointly organized by
the University of Calabria (Italy), the Aalto University (Finland), and the
University of Genova (Italy), and is affiliated with the 30th International
Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2014). It features a completely
re-designed setup, with novelties involving the design of tracks, the scoring
schema, and the adherence to a fixed modeling language in order to push the
adoption of the ASP-Core-2 standard. Benchmark domains are taken from past
editions, and best system packages submitted in 2013 are compared with new
versions and solvers.
To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).Comment: 10 page
A Multi-Engine Approach to Answer Set Programming
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a truly-declarative programming paradigm
proposed in the area of non-monotonic reasoning and logic programming, that has
been recently employed in many applications. The development of efficient ASP
systems is, thus, crucial. Having in mind the task of improving the solving
methods for ASP, there are two usual ways to reach this goal: extending
state-of-the-art techniques and ASP solvers, or designing a new ASP
solver from scratch. An alternative to these trends is to build on top of
state-of-the-art solvers, and to apply machine learning techniques for choosing
automatically the "best" available solver on a per-instance basis.
In this paper we pursue this latter direction. We first define a set of
cheap-to-compute syntactic features that characterize several aspects of ASP
programs. Then, we apply classification methods that, given the features of the
instances in a {\sl training} set and the solvers' performance on these
instances, inductively learn algorithm selection strategies to be applied to a
{\sl test} set. We report the results of a number of experiments considering
solvers and different training and test sets of instances taken from the ones
submitted to the "System Track" of the 3rd ASP Competition. Our analysis shows
that, by applying machine learning techniques to ASP solving, it is possible to
obtain very robust performance: our approach can solve more instances compared
with any solver that entered the 3rd ASP Competition. (To appear in Theory and
Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).)Comment: 26 pages, 8 figure
Anytime Computation of Cautious Consequences in Answer Set Programming
Query answering in Answer Set Programming (ASP) is usually solved by
computing (a subset of) the cautious consequences of a logic program. This task
is computationally very hard, and there are programs for which computing
cautious consequences is not viable in reasonable time. However, current ASP
solvers produce the (whole) set of cautious consequences only at the end of
their computation. This paper reports on strategies for computing cautious
consequences, also introducing anytime algorithms able to produce sound answers
during the computation.Comment: To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programmin
The Multi-engine ASP Solver ME-ASP: Progress Report
MEASP is a multi-engine solver for ground ASP programs. It exploits algorithm
selection techniques based on classification to select one among a set of
out-of-the-box heterogeneous ASP solvers used as black-box engines. In this
paper we report on (i) a new optimized implementation of MEASP; and (ii) an
attempt of applying algorithm selection to non-ground programs. An experimental
analysis reported in the paper shows that (i) the new implementation of \measp
is substantially faster than the previous version; and (ii) the multi-engine
recipe can be applied to the evaluation of non-ground programs with some
benefits
Constraints, Lazy Constraints, or Propagators in ASP Solving: An Empirical Analysis
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established declarative paradigm. One
of the successes of ASP is the availability of efficient systems.
State-of-the-art systems are based on the ground+solve approach. In some
applications this approach is infeasible because the grounding of one or few
constraints is expensive. In this paper, we systematically compare alternative
strategies to avoid the instantiation of problematic constraints, that are
based on custom extensions of the solver. Results on real and synthetic
benchmarks highlight some strengths and weaknesses of the different strategies.
(Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP, ICLP 2017 Special Issue.)Comment: Paper presented at the 33nd International Conference on Logic
Programming (ICLP 2017), Melbourne, Australia, August 28 to September 1,
2017. 16 page
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