Expressiveness of Logic Programs under the General Stable Model Semantics

Abstract

Stable model semantics had been recently generalized to non-Herbrand structures by several works, which provides a unified framework and solid logical foundations for answer set programming. This article focuses on the expressiveness of normal and disjunctive logic programs under general stable model semantics. A translation from disjunctive logic programs to normal logic programs is proposed for infinite structures. Over finite structures, some disjunctive logic programs are proved to be intranslatable to normal logic programs if the arities of auxiliary predicates and functions are bounded in a certain way. The equivalence of the expressiveness of normal logic programs and disjunctive logic programs over arbitrary structures is also shown to coincide with that over finite structures and coincide with whether the complexity class NP is closed under complement. Moreover, to obtain a more explicit picture of the expressiveness, some intertranslatability results between logic program classes, and fragments of second-order logic are established.