by Giovambattista Ianni,
Universita’ della Calabria,
Italy
http://aspcomp2011.mat.unical.it
The Third Answer Set Programming Competition is now open and in the Call for benchmarks stage. The event is open to ASP systems and any other system based on a declarative specification paradigm.
Important dates Summary:
- Problem selection stage:
- December 25th, 2010 – Deadline for Problem submission
- Competition stage:
- February 4th, 2011 – Deadline for Systems submission
- May 16th 2011 – Announcement of results and awards at LPNMR 2011 – Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Answer Set Programming is a well-established paradigm of declarative programming with close relationship to other declarative modelling paradigms and languages such as SAT Modulo Theories, Constraint Handling Rules, FO(.), PDDL and many others.
Since the first informal editions (Dagstuhl 2002 and 2005), ASP systems compare themselves in the nowadays customary ASP Competition: the Third ASP Competition will take place at the University of Calabria (Italy) in the first half of 2011. The event is the sequel to the ASP Competitions Series, held at the University of Potsdam in Germany (2006-2007) and at the University of Leuven in Belgium in 2009. The current competition is held in cooperation with the 11th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR 11) where the results will be published.
Competition Format
Participants will compete on a selected collection of declarative specifications of benchmark problems, and instances thereof. Before the registration of competitor systems, there will be a problem selection stage, in which participants and interested researchers will be able to submit problem specifications; these will be then selected by the Organizing Committee, after an informal review and discussion stage.
Competition Tracks
The Competition will be constituted by two different sub-competitions, conceived for promoting some equivalently important, yet orthogonal, aspects:
- the Model & Solve Competition, held on an open problem encoding, open language basis, and open to any system based on a declarative specification paradigm, and
- the System Competition, held on the basis of fixed problem encodings, written in a standard ASP language.
In the former competition track, the team can choose the best system configuration along with the best encoding for each problem, while, in the latter, the system and its configuration is fixed for all problems.
Given that the interest towards parallel ASP systems is increasing, we encourage the submission of parallel systems as non-competing participants to both the competition tracks.
Further information can be found on the competition web site at:
http://aspcomp2011.mat.unical.it