The Answer Set Programming Competition

The competition consists of two main tracks: the ASP system track and the model and solve track. The traditional system track compares dedicated answer set solvers on ASP benchmarks, while the model and solve track invites any researcher and developer of declarative knowledge representation systems to participate in an open challenge for solving sophisticated AI problems with their tools of choice. This article provides an overview of the ASP Competition series, reviews its origins and history, giving insights on organizing and running such an elaborate event, and briefly discusses the lessons learned so far. The main goal of ASP is to provide a versatile declarative modeling framework with many attractive characteristics. These features allow turning -- with little to no effort -- problem statements of computationally hard problems into executable formal specifications, also called answer set programs.