Files
Download Full Text (1.6 MB)
Description
Answer set programming (ASP) is a form of declarative programming oriented towards modeling i intelligent agents in knowledge representation and reasoning and ii difficult combinatorial search problems. It belongs to the group of so called constraint programming languages. ASP has been applied to a variety of applications including plan generation and product configuration problems in artificial intelligence and graph-theoretic problems arising in VLSI design and in historical linguistics [1]. Syntactically, ASP programs look like logic programs in Prolog, but the computational mechanisms used in ASP are different: they are based on the ideas stemming from the development of satisfiability solvers for propositional logic. This document presents the concept of an answer set for programs in their simplest form: no variables, no classical negation symbol, no disjunction in the heads of rules. The textbooks [?, 2] provide an account for general definition of this concept that assumes rules of the general form that includes all the features mentioned above. Yet, it is useful to first consider as simple programs as possible to build intuitions about answer sets. In this note italics is primarily used to identify concepts that are being defined. Some definitions are identified by the word Definition.
Publication Date
8-2020
Publisher
University of Nebraska at Omaha
City
Omaha, Nebraska
Recommended Citation
Lierler, Yuliya, "Handout on Basics behind Answer Sets" (2020). Computer Science Faculty Books and Monographs. 2.
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/compscifacbooks/2
Comments
The author is the copyright holder and any reuse must be obtained from them directly.
Parts of these notes follow the lecture notes on Answer Sets; and Methodology of Answer Set Programming; course Answer set programming: CS395T, Spring 20051 by Vladimir Lifschitz. Zachary Hansen helped to correct some typos.