Formal Methods for Answer Set Programming

Abstract

Answer set programming is a logic programming paradigm that has increased in popularity over the past decade and found applications in a wide variety of elds. Even so, manuals written by the designers of answer set solvers usually described the semantics of the input languages of their systems using examples and informal comments that appeal to the users’ intuition, without references to any precise semantics. We describe a precise semantics for the input language of the grounder gringo, which serves as the front end for several answer set solvers. The semantics represents gringo rules as innitary propositional formulas. We develop methods for using this semantics to prove properties of gringo programs, such as verifying program correctness.