Model & Solve Competition

Aims

Regulations of the Model & Solve Competition are conceived taking into account the following considerations.

1. The development of new expressive constructs and modeling paradigms is, per se, a richness. On the one hand, the introduction of new constructs in the context of ASP often helps in improving the ease of writing problem specifications, it stimulates new understandings of knowledge representation, and, as a typical side effect, promotes the invention of solvers efficiently tailored at the evaluation of such, useful, constructs. On the other hand, it fosters exchange of ideas between communities in close relationship with ASP. In this sense, a competition in which no constraint is enforced on the specification language of choice, can be seen as the "gymnasium" in which new language features grow in maturity until they become part of the standard.

2. Another aspect which a competition should stimulate is the development of new ad-hoc solving methods, and of refined problem specifications; indeed, finely-tuned evaluation techniques are per se an important ground on which systems should strive for excellence. In this respect, the Model & Solve competition should put in evidence the performance of a system when used at the best of its possibilities on a given problem abstract formulation. Teams, more than systems, will thus be ranked based on the quality of their problem modelings, their declarative system, and their solving techniques. In such a sense, rankings on the Model & 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.

Rules outline

In the light of the above, the Model & Solve competition will be held under the following principles:

1. The competition organizers make a set of problem specifications public, together with a set of test instances, these latter expressed in a common instance input format.
2. Per each problem, teams are allowed to submit a specific solver (or an evaluation script) and a problem encoding.
3. Any submitted solution to a problem must be mainly based on a declarative specification system.

Detailed rules can be found in Rules & Scoring.