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The regulations of the Competition are conceived taking into account the following considerations:
We think, however, that the ASP community is mature enough for starting the development of a common standard input format: an ASP system can be roughly seen as composed of a front-end input language processor and a model generator. The first module is usually (but not necessarily) named grounder, for it produces a propositional program obtained from an higher-level specification of the problem at hand.
Incidentally, currently developed ASP grounder systems have recently reached a good degree of maturity, and, above all, they have reached a fairly large degree of overlap in their input formats. This paves the way for taking the very first serious step towards the proposal of a common input language for ASP solvers.
It thus makes sense to play (part of) the Third ASP competition on the grounds of a common draft input format, in order to promote the adoption of a newly devised standard, and foster the birth of a new standardization working group.
In order to met the above goals, the competition input format should be large enough to embed all of the basic constructs included in the language originally specified in [#!gelf-lifs-91!#] (and lifted to its non-ground version), yet conservative enough to allow all the participants to adhere to the standard draft with little or no effort.
Performance of a given ASP system S
Although, on the one hand, it is important to encourage system
developers to fine-tune their systems, and then compete on
this basis, on the other hand it is similarly important to
put in evidence how a solver performs with its default
behavior: indeed, the user of an ASP system has generally
little or no knowledge of the system internals, and might
not be aware of which program rewritings and system
optimization methods pay off in terms of performance.
The competition should thus put in evidence the
performance of a system when used as an off-the-shelf
black box on a supposedly unknown problem specification.
Rankings on the 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). The formula of the competition thus aims
at measuring the
performance of a given solver when used on a generic
problem encoding, and not when this is fine-tuned
for the specific problems selected for
the current competition.
Given the above considerations, the competition will be held on the basis of the following principles:
Detailed rules can be found in the Competition Rules document [#!participationrules!#]. }}}