Rules & Scoring

Rules for System competition

In the light of the above considerations, the System competition will be held under the following regulations.

1. The System competition is open to general-purpose ASP systems, able to parse the two fixed formats ASP-Core and ASP-RFC (see File and Language Format).

2. The competition is run over a selection of problems. For each problem, a corresponding, fixed encoding in ASP-Core or ASP-RFC, together with a set of benchmarks instances, is chosen by the organizers (see Benchmark problems classification);

3. Each participating solver will be launched with its default settings on each problem instance.

4. Syntactic special-purpose solving techniques are strictly forbidden. Among syntactic solving techniques we classify the switch of internal solver options depending on:

   • command-line file names;
   • predicate and variable names;
   • "signature" techniques, aimed at recognizing a particular benchmark problem, such as counting the number of rules, constraints, predicates and atoms in a given encoding.
   In order to discourage such techniques the competition committee holds the right to introduce in the competition evaluation platform syntactic means for scrambling program encodings, such as, e.g., file, predicate and variable random renaming. Furthermore, the committee takes, in general, the right to replace official program encodings with syntactically changed versions.

5. The semantic recognition of the program structure is allowed (and encouraged), instead. Among allowed semantic recognition techniques, we classify the following.

   • Recognition of the class the program encoding belongs to (e.g., stratified, positive, etc.) and possible consequent switch on of on-purpose evaluation techniques.
   • Recognition of general rule and program structures (e.g., common un-stratified even and odd-cycles, common join patterns within a rule body, etc.), provided these techniques are general and not peculiar of a given problem selected for the competition.

Rules for the Model & Solve competition

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

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 (basically, a set of facts in standard syntax).
2. Per each problem, teams are allowed to submit a specific solver and a problem encoding (if any).
3. The competition is run over the same set of instances already known a priori? (in principle this is ok here).

Parallel solvers

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.

Awards

Rankings of participants will be computed according to the Rules & Scoring, awarding a winner for the System Competition and a winner for the Model & Solve competition.