We propose a new declarative semantics for logic programs with negation. Its formulation is quite simple; at the same time, it is more general than the iterated fixed point semantics for stratied programs, and is applicable to some useful programs that are not stratified.

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Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) is a merger of two declarative paradigms: constraint solving and logic programming. Although a relatively new field, CLP has progressed in several quite different directions. In particular, the early fundamental concepts have been adapted to better serve in different areas of applications. In this survey of CLP, a primary goal is to give a systematic description of the major trends in terms of common fundamental concepts. The three main parts cover the theory, implementation issues, and programming for applications.

There has been substantial recent interest in two new families of search techniques. One family consists of nonsystematic methods such as gsat; the other contains systematic approaches that use a polynomial amount of justification information to prune the search space. This paper introduces a new technique that combines these two approaches. The algorithm allows substantial freedom of movement in the search space but enough information is retained to ensure the systematicity of the resulting analysis. Bounds are given for the size of the justification database and conditions are presented that guarantee that this database will be polynomial in the size of the problem in question. 1 INTRODUCTION The past few years have seen rapid progress in the development of algorithms for solving constraintsatisfaction problems, or csps. Csps arise naturally in subfields of AI from planning to vision, and examples include propositional theorem proving, map coloring and scheduling problems. The probl...

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This paper surveys various complexity results on different forms of logic programming. The main focus is on decidable forms of logic programming, in particular, propositional logic programming and datalog, but we also mention general logic programming with function symbols. Next to classical results on plain logic programming (pure Horn clause programs), more recent results on various important extensions of logic programming are surveyed. These include logic programming with different forms of negation, disjunctive logic programming, logic programming with equality, and constraint logic programming. The complexity of the unification problem is also addressed.

Disjunctive Logic Programming (DLP) is an advanced formalism for knowledge representation and reasoning, which is very expressive in a precise mathematical sense: it allows to express every property of finite structures that is decidable in the complexity class ΣP 2 (NPNP). Thus, under widely believed assumptions, DLP is strictly more expressive than normal (disjunction-free) logic programming, whose expressiveness is limited to properties decidable in NP. Importantly, apart from enlarging the class of applications which can be encoded in the language, disjunction often allows for representing problems of lower complexity in a simpler and more natural fashion. This paper presents the DLV system, which is widely considered the state-of-the-art implementation of disjunctive logic programming, and addresses several aspects. As for problem solving, we provide a formal definition of its kernel language, function-free disjunctive logic programs (also known as disjunctive datalog), extended by weak constraints, which are a powerful tool to express optimization problems. We then illustrate the usage of DLV as a tool for knowledge representation and reasoning, describing a new declarative programming methodology which allows one to encode complex problems (up to ∆P 3-complete problems) in a declarative fashion. On the foundational side, we provide a detailed analysis of the computational complexity of the language of

In many cases, a logic program can be divided into two parts, so that one of them, the \bottom " part, does not refer to the predicates de ned in the \top " part. The \bottom " rules can be used then for the evaluation of the predicates that they de ne, and the computed values can be used to simplify the \top " de nitions. We discuss this idea of splitting a program in the context of the answer set semantics. The main theorem shows how computing the answer sets for a program can be simpli ed when the program is split into parts. The programs covered by the theorem may use both negation as failure and classical negation, and their rules may have disjunctive heads. The usefulness of the concept of splitting for the investigation of answer sets is illustrated by several applications. First, we show that a conservative extension theorem by Gelfond and Przymusinska and a theorem on the closed world assumption by Gelfond and Lifschitz are easy consequences of the splitting theorem. Second, (locally) strati ed programs are shown to have a simple characterization in terms of splitting. The existence and uniqueness of an answer set for such a program can be easily derived from this characterization. Third, we relate the idea of splitting to the notion of order-consistency. 1

SLD resolution with negation as finite failure (SLDNF) reflects the procedural interpretation of predicate calculus as a programming language and forms the computational basis for Prolog systems. Despite its advantages for stack-based memory management, SLDNF is often not appropriate for query evaluation for three reasons: a) it may not terminate due to infinite positive recursion; b) it may not terminate due to infinite recursion through negation; c) it may repeatedly evaluate the same literal in a rule body, leading to unacceptable performance. We address three problems fir a goal-oriented query evaluation of general logic programs by presenting tabled evaluation with delaying (SLG resolution).

We survey here various approaches which were proposed to incorporate negation in logic programs. We concentrate on the proof-theoretic and model-theoretic issues and the relationships between them.