[PlanetKR] Third ASP Competition - Call for Benchmark Problems and Participation

[Giovambattista Ianni]

[Apologies for cross-posting]

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               The Third Answer Set Programming Competition

               Call For Participation and Benchmark problems

   	         University of Calabria, Fall 2010 - Winter 2011

                     http://aspcomp2011.mat.unical.it
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The Third Answer Set Programming Competition is currently 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.

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Important dates Summary:
  * Problem selection stage:
     * December 25th, 2010  - Deadline for Problems submission
  * Competition stage:
     * February 4th, 2011 - Deadline for Systems submission
  * May 16th 2011
    Announcement of results and awards at LPNMR 2011 - Vancouver, BC, Canada.
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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.

Since its previous edition, the ASP competition is held as an open tournament. 
The "Model & Solve" competition track of this year's edition inherits the spirit 
of integration and is open to all types of solvers: ASP-systems, SAT-solvers, 
SMT-solvers, CP-systems, FOL-reasoners, planning-reasoners or any other.

== Call for benchmark problems ==

Participants will compete on a selected collection of declarative specifications 
of benchmark problems, taken from a variety of domains as well as real world 
applications, and instances thereof. All participants and researchers are 
encouraged to provide their help by proposing and/or devising new challenging 
benchmark problems, and providing support for them.

Any kind of problem can be submitted; the submission of problems arising from
applications having practical impact are strongly encouraged; problems used in 
the former ASP Competitions, or variants thereof, can be re-submitted.

Call for benchmark problems details:
http://www.mat.unical.it/aspcomp2011/BenchmarkSubmission

== Competition Tracks ==

The Competition will be constituted by two different sub-competitions, conceived 
for promoting some equivalently important, yet orthogonal, aspects:

  1. 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

  2. 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