Third ASP Competition: Call for Participation

[Giovambattista Ianni]

[Apologies for multiple copies]

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               The Third Answer Set Programming Competition

                          Call For Participation

   	    University of Calabria, Fall 2010 - Winter 2011

                     http://aspcomp2011.mat.unical.it
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The Third Answer Set Programming Competition is now open and in the Call for 
benchmarks stage.
The event is open to ASP systems and any other system based on a
declarative specification paradigm.

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Important dates Summary:
  * Problem selection stage:
     * December 25th, 2010  - Deadline for Problem submission
  * Competition stage:
     * February 4th, 2011 - Deadline for Systems submission
  * May 16th 2011
    Announcement of results and awards at LPNMR 2011 - Vancouver, BC, Canada.
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Answer Set Programming is a well-established paradigm of declarative
programming with close relationship to other declarative modelling paradigms
and languages such as SAT Modulo Theories, Constraint Handling Rules, FO(.),
PDDL and many others.

Since the first informal editions (Dagstuhl 2002 and 2005), ASP systems compare 
themselves in the nowadays customary ASP Competition: the Third ASP Competition 
will take place at the University of Calabria (Italy) in the first half of 2011. 
The event is the sequel to the ASP Competitions Series, held at the University 
of Potsdam in Germany (2006-2007) and at the University of Leuven in Belgium in 
2009. The current competition is held in cooperation with the 11th International 
Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR 11) where the 
results will be published.

== Competition Format ==

Participants will compete on a selected collection of declarative specifications 
of benchmark problems, and instances thereof. Before the registration of 
competitor systems, there will be a problem selection stage, in which 
participants and interested researchers will be able to submit problem
specifications; these will be then selected by the Organizing Committee, after
an informal review and discussion stage.

== Competition Tracks ==

The Competition will be constituted by two different sub-competitions,
conceived for promoting some equivalently important, yet orthogonal, aspects:

  1. the Model & Solve Competition, held on an open problem encoding, open 
language basis, and open to any system based on a declarative specification 
paradigm, and

  2. the System Competition, held on the basis of fixed problem encodings, 
written in a standard ASP language.

In the former competition track, the team can choose the best system 
configuration along with the best encoding for each problem, while, in the 
latter, the system and its configuration is fixed for all problems.

Given that the interest towards parallel ASP systems is
increasing, we encourage the submission of parallel
systems as non-competing participants to both the competition tracks.

Further information can be found on the competition web site at:

http://aspcomp2011.mat.unical.it