ASP∀: Answer Set Programming “Algorithms”
ASP∀ is the genesis of our group and its mission. Dr. Guerin has studied logic and other declarative programming forms for decades, and the state of many modern languages includes more and more declarative ideas (e.g., monads, functional programming generalizations, etc.). As he has taught Answer Set Programming for many years (Programming Languages Paradigms, AI, etc.). Computationally difficult problems became a focus of many of his courses, which generated a repository of solutions to classical problems in computing, with a specific focus on NP-Complete and NP-Hard problems.
This solutions repository received affirmative reactions from the community over the years despite there being no formal publishing. As the repository traffic increased, as did a refocusing on education and utility regarding the paradigm of ASP. Traffic would spike at arbitrary intervals during the semester indicating that traffic may be coming from entire course sections at a time. The need for a more robust system was apprenticed, and two of Dr. Guerin’s first cohort of undergraduates (David and Jackson, undergraduate at the time) helped build out a full pipeline consisting of problem generation and custom display utilities.
In turn, this expanded into the introduction to the academic community: An international publication at the Florida AI Research Symposium (FLAIRS-39) which emboldened the trio of participants, rapidly evolving from a single repository into ASP∀: The Answer Set Programming Research Group, an interdisciplinary and cross-institution effort to improve efficiency in computational processes, in particular providing novel implementations in the paradigm of ASP, expanding the frontiers of logical programming education, and (we hope) producing more sustainable computing across the spectrum of difficult problems in the discipline.
The repository serves as the backbone of our group, but we plan far more in terms of proselytizing the virtues of efficient programming in computational difficult domains and (we hope) improving the computational landscape in a way that moves away from inefficient and environmentally hazardous computing.
ASP∀: The Answer Set Programming Research Group 