Date Available

12-14-2011

Year of Publication

2001

Document Type

Dissertation

College

Engineering

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Miroslaw Truszczynski

Abstract

Knowledge representation and search are two fundamental areas of artificial intelligence. Knowledge representation is the area of artificial intelligence which deals with capturing, in a formal language, the properties of objects and the relationships between objects. Search is a systematic examination of all possible candidate solutions to a problem that is described as a theory in some knowledge representation formalism. We compare traditional declarative programming formalisms such as PROLOG and DATALOG with answer-set programming formalisms such as logic programming with stable model semantic. In this thesis we develop an answer-set formalism we can DC. The logic of DC is based on the logic of prepositional schemata and a version of Closed World Assumption. Two important features of the DC logic is that it supports modeling of the cardinalities of sets and Horn clauses. These two features facilitate modeling of search problems. The DC system includes and implementation of a grounder and a solver. The grounder for the DC system grounds instances of problems retaining the structure of the cardinality of sets. The resulting theories are thus more concise. In addition, the solver for the DC system utilizes the structure of cardinality of sets to perform more efficient search. The second feature, Horn clauses, are used when transitive closure will eliminate the need for additional variables. The semantics of the Horn clauses are retained in the grounded theories. This also results in more concise theories. Our goal in developing DC is to provide the computer science community with a system which facilitates modeling of problems, is easy to use, is efficient and captures the class of problems in NP-search. We show experimental results comparing DC to other systems. These results show that DC is always competitive with state-of-the-art answer-set programming systems and for many problems DC is more efficient.

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