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Third Answer Set Programming Competition - 2011

** UNDER CONSTRUCTION - THIS SITE WILL BE OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCED SOON **

Answer Set Programming is a well-established paradigm of declarative programming with close relationship with other declarative modelling paradigms and languages such as SAT Modulo Theories, Constraint Handling Rules, FO(.), PDDL and many others.

Since the first informal editions (Dagstuhl 2002 and 2005), ASP systems compete in the nowadays customary ASP Competition: the Third ASP Competition will take place at the University of Calabria (Italy) in the first half of 2011. The event is the sequel to the ASP Competitions Series, held at the Universitaet Potsdam in Germany (2006-2007) and at the University of Leuven in Belgium in 2009. The current competition is held jointly with the 11th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR 11) where the results will be published.

The formula of the event is open to ASP systems and any other system based on a declarative specification paradigm.

Participant will compete on a selected collection of benchmark problems, declarative specifications and instances thereof. Before the application of competitor systems, there will be a problem selection stage, in which participants and interested researchers will be able to submit problem specifications; these will be then selected by the Organizing Committee, after an informal review and discussion stage.

The Competition will be constituted by two different sub-competitions, conceived for fostering some equivalently important, yet orthogonal, aspects:

  1. the Model & Solve Competition, held on an open problem encoding, open language basis, and open to any system based on a declarative specification paradigm.

  2. the System Competition, held on the basis of fixed problem encodings, in a standard ASP language and

In the former competition the system and its configuration is fixed for all problems; while in the latter the team can choose the best system configuration along with the best encoding for each problem.

Given that the interest towards parallel ASP systems is legitimately increasing, we encourage the submission of parallel systems as non-competing participants to both the competition tracks.

The Universita' della Calabria team will play the role of neutral referee and will not participate with an own system.

Model and Solve Competition

The Model & Solve Competition is conceived for

(1) fostering existing relationships with communities neighbor to ASP; (2) encourage the development of new ASP constructs or entirely newly devised declarative programming paradigms; (3) let the partipants compete in an open language, open problem specification regime.

In this track, the specification language and the problem encoding are open to the choice of participants. Specialized solutions are allowed: however any submitted solution must be fairly based on a declarative specification system. Rankings on the Model and Solve competition should give a fairly objective measure of what one can expect when a system is adjusted with an encoding of choice and with an evaluation technique of choice for the problem at hand.

System Competition

The System Competition is conceived for 1) fostering the introduction of a standard language for ASP, and the birth of a new working group for defining an official standard; 2) let the competitors compare each other in fixed conditions.

In this track, problem encodings will be fixed for all participants: specialized solutions on a per problems basis are not allowed. Problems will be specified in the two languages ASP-Core (for most problems) and ASP-RFC. Rankings on the System competition should give a fairly objective measure of what one can expect when switching from a system to another, while keeping all other conditions fixed (problem encoding and default solver settings).

Standard Languages

The large part of the problems will be encoded in ASP-Core, which collects basic ASP features very popular in current systems. A small portion of the problems will be encoded in ASP-RFC to encourage the standardization of other popular basic features.

ASP-Core is a conservative extension to the non-ground case of the SCore language adopted in the First ASP Competition; it complies with the core language draft specified at LPNMR 2004, and basically refers to the language specified in the seminal paper Gelfond&Lifschitz 1991; its constructs are nowadays common in current ASP parsers. ASP-Core includes: ground queries, disjunctive rules with negation as failure, strong negation and arithmetic builtins. Terms are constants and variables only.

The ASP-RFC format comes in the form of a "Request for Comments" from the ASP community, and extends ASP-Core with non-ground queries, function symbols and a limited number of pre-defined aggregate functions. A limited number of problems specified in ASP-RFC will be selected for the System competition. We do expect the ASP-RFC format will foster discussion in the community and feed useful material to the foreseen forthcoming constitution of an ASP standard language working group.

We understand that the semantics of aggregate atoms is currently subject of debate in the community: for the sake of the Competition, ASP-RFC programs are restricted to programs containing non-recursive aggregates where there is a full semantic agreement. Other reasonable restrictions apply for ensuring that integers and function symbols are finitely handled. Usage of full disjunction is circumscribed only to a restricted portion of the selected benchmarks, and converters to equivalent formats will be made available to competitors.

Awards

The competition will award a winner for the System Competition and a winner for the Model & Solve competition.

Further detail can be found in the Detailed Information section.

Important Dates

Contacts

Detailed Information