Abstract
Several paradigms for declarative problem solving start from a specification in a high-level language, which is then transformed to a low-level language, such as SAT or SMT. Often, this transformation includes a “grounding” step to remove first-order quantification. To reduce the time and size of the grounding, it can be useful to simplify formulas along the way, e.g., by taking into account the interpretation of symbols that are already known. In this paper, we investigate the use of bit vectors to efficiently simplify formulas, thereby taking advantage of the fact that, on modern hardware, logical operations on bit vectors can be executed extremely fast. We conduct an experimental analysis, which shows that bit vectors are indeed fast for certain problems, but also have limitations.
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Acknowledgements
This research received funding from the Flemish Government under the “Onderzoeksprogramma Artificiële Intelligentie (AI) Vlaanderen” programme and by Flanders Innovation & Entrepreneurship (HBC.2022.0071, Tetra-project). We would also like to thank Bart Bogaerts and Jo Devriendt.
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Van Laer, L., Vandevelde, S., Vennekens, J. (2025). Efficiently Grounding FOL Using Bit Vectors. In: Dodaro, C., Gupta, G., Martinez, M.V. (eds) Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning. LPNMR 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 15245. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74209-5_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74209-5_13
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