Achievements in Answer Set Programming

This paper describes an approach to the methodology of answe r set programming [ Marek and Truszczynski, 1999, Niemel a, 1999] that can facilitate the design of encodings that are easy to u nderstand and provably correct. Under this approach, after appending a rule or a small g roup of rules to the emerging program, the programmer would include a comment that states what has been "achieved" so far, in a certain precise sense. Consider, for instance, the following solution to the 8 quee ns problem, adapted from [ Gebser et al., 2012, Section 3.2 ] .