Abstract
Answer Set Programming (ASP) under the stable model semantics supports various language constructs which can be used to express the same realities in syntactically different, but semantically equivalent ways. However, these equivalent programs may not perform equally well. This is because performance depends on the underlying solver implementations that may treat different language constructs differently. As performance is very important for the successful application of ASP in real-life domains, knowledge about the mutual interchangeability and performance of ASP language constructs is crucial for knowledge engineers. In this article, we present an investigation on how the usage of different language constructs affects the performance of state-of-the-art solvers and grounders on benchmark problems from the ASP competition. Hereby, we focus on constructs used to express disjunction or choice, classical negation, and various aggregate functions. Some interesting effects of language constructs on solving performance are revealed.
This article summarizes the key findings of Richard Taupe’s master’s thesis [21]. Erich Teppan provided the idea for the topic and supervised the thesis. Both authors contributed equally to this paper.
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Notes
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To distinguish predicates with the same symbol but different arities, identifiers like p / n can be used.
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Please find datasets and additional information at https://www.mat.unical.it/aspcomp2013 and https://www.mat.unical.it/aspcomp2014.
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Encodings can be downloaded from http://isbi.aau.at/hint/misc.
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Please find more information about head-cycles in [16].
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Acknowledgements
The research for this paper was conducted in the scope of the project Heuristic Intelligence (HINT) funded by the Austrian research fund FFG under grant 840242.
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Taupe, R., Teppan, E. (2016). Influence of ASP Language Constructs on the Performance of State-of-the-Art Solvers. In: Friedrich, G., Helmert, M., Wotawa, F. (eds) KI 2016: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9904. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46073-4_7
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