Rules & Scoring
Rules for System competition
In the light of the above considerations, the System competition will be held under the following regulations.
- The System competition is open to general-purpose ASP systems, able to parse the two fixed formats \aspcore and \asprfc (see Section~\ref{sec:inputformats}).
- The competition is run over a selection of problems. For each problem, a corresponding, fixed encoding in \aspcore or \asprfc, together with a set of benchmarks instances, is chosen by the organizers (see the Call for Problems document \cite{callforproblems});
- Each participating solver will be launched with its default settings on each problem instance.
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.
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:
- 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).
- Per each problem, teams are allowed to submit a specific solver and a problem encoding (if any).
- The competition is run over the same set of instances already known a priori? (in principle this is ok here).