Answer Set Programming and the Design of Deliberative Agents

Abstract

AbstractAnswer set programming (ASP) (see, for instance, [22]) is a new declarative programming paradigm suitable for solving a large range of problems related to knowledge representation and search. The paradigm is rooted in recent developments in several areas of artificial intelligence. ASP starts by encoding relevant domain knowledge as a (possibly disjunctive) logic program, Π. The connectives of this program are normally understood in accordance with the answer set (stable model) semantics [12,13]. The corresponding language is frequently referred to as A-Prolog (or ANS-Prolog). The language’s ability to express defaults, i.e. statements of the form “normally, objects of class C have property P”, coupled with its natural treatment of recursion, and other useful features, often leads to a comparatively concise and clear representation of knowledge. Insights on the nature of causality and its relationship with the answer sets of logic programs [14,21,25] allows for the description of the effects of actions which solves the frame, ramification, and qualification problems, which for a long time have caused difficulties in modeling knowledge about dynamic domains.