List of News:
Systems Announcements
Other Announcements
- ALP Looking for a Web Designer
- Computability in Europe, New Association
- Rule Interchange Format Documents
- ASP Competition
- Nominations for Editor-in-Chief of ACM ToCL
CHOCO V2
Communicated by Narenda Jussien
URL: http://choco.emn.fr/
The CHOCO development team is happy to announce the release of the new version of its open-source constraint solver: CHOCO V2.
CHOCO is Java library that can be used for:
- teaching (a user-oriented constraint solver with open-source code)
- research (state-of-the-art algorithms and techniques, user-defined constraints, domains and variables)
- real-life applications (many application now embed CHOCO)
CHOCO V2 is available online with a complete documentation, tutorials, various materials, forums, etc.
Please visit http://choco.emn.fr for downloading and more information.
Computability in Europe
Communicated by Arnold Beckmann
URL: http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/acie/
After four very successful conferences in Amsterdam in 2005, Swansea in 2006, Siena in 2007 and Athens in 2008, our community has officially formed the association
Computability in Europe
at the Annual General Meeting at this year's Computability in Europe conference in Athens. The object of the Association is to promote the development, particularly in Europe, of computability-related science, ranging over mathematics, computer science, and applications in various natural and engineering sciences such as physics and biology. This also includes the promotion of the study of philosophy and history of computing as it relates to questions of computability. A draft constitution of the Association can be found at
http://www.amsta.leeds.ac.uk/~pmt6sbc/CiE.const.draft.pdf
We invite every researcher interested in the object of the Association to become a member. The initial membership fee is set at zero, and lasts until 30 June 2010.
To apply for membership of the Association, please complete and submit the form at
http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/acie/
Any enquiries concerning association CiE membership should be sent to the Membership Secretary, Arnold Beckmann, at a.beckmann@swansea.ac.uk.
Rule Interchange Format
Communicated by Michael Kiefer
URL: http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/RIF_Working_Group
The W3C Rule Interchange Format working group
has released a number of documents and comments from the public to the Working Group are welcome at mailto:public-rif-comments@w3.org
The most developed ones are the Basic Logic Dialect and the RDF and OWL Compatibility documents, which have reached the status of the "Last Call" drafts.
But for the logic programming and deductive database communities the more interesting document is the Framework for Logic Dialects
which is supposed to be a framework by which more powerful RIF dialects will be defined.
MKAtoms 2.8
Communicated by Marcello Balduccini
URL: http://krlab.cs.ttu.edu/~marcy/mkatoms/
Version
2.8 of mkatoms is now available from
http://krlab.cs.ttu.edu/~marcy/mkatoms/. The latest features are the
ability to handle the output of clasp and a new command-line option
that allows to format the output of mkatoms as a single “meta-model”
consisting of atoms of the form “holds_in(l,k)”, where l is a literal
and k is the 1-based index of the answer set where it occurs.
The
new version of mkatoms also allows running crmodels
(http://krlab.cs.ttu.edu/~marcy/crmodels/) on top of clasp (as well as
smodels). To use clasp, invoke crmodels with the extra command line
option “--smodels clasp”, e.g.
crmodels --smodels clasp test.cr
(If clasp is not in a directory that occurs in your PATH variable, please replace “clasp” by the full path to the executable.)
Version
1.56 of crmodels has been successfully tested with clasp. Earlier
versions released after the introduction of the “--smodels" option
probably work as well.
Potassco
Communicated by Torsten Schaub
URL: http://potassco.sourceforge.net/
Dear All,
we are happy to announce the sourceforge project Potassco at
http://potassco.sourceforge.net/ (or: http://sourceforge.net/projects/potassco/)
Potassco, the Potsdam Answer Set Solving Collection, bundles tools for Answer Set Programming (ASP) developed at the University of Potsdam. So far, this collection contains the source, binaries, and documentation of the answer set solver clasp, the grounder GrinGo, and their combinations Clingo and iClingo:
- GrinGo has had its second major release, now supporting function symbols, classical negation, disjunction, aggregates, an much more.
- Clingo is a monolithic combination of clasp and gringo.
- iClingo is an ASP system that allows for dealing incrementally with parameterized problems, as encountered for instance in bioinformatics, planning, and model checking.
- clasp comes now in release 1.1.1
For bug reports, feature or support requests use either the tracker at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=238741 or drop us a mail.
Datalog Educational System
Communicated by Fernando Sáenz Pérez
URL: http://des.sourceforge.net/
This is a mail just for informing that the new release
Datalog Educational System version 1.6.1
http://des.sourceforge.net
has been launched on November, 10th, 2008 and ported to
Ciao Prolog 1.10p5
Release notes are attached to the end of this message. Please, see http://des.sourceforge.net for details.
ASP Competition
Communicated by Mark Denecker
URL: http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dtai/ASP-competition
The second ASP-competition will take place in the first half of 2009 and will be run on a pool of linux machines of the DTAI-research group of the K.U.Leuven, Belgium. Details on the competition will be available on the website http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dtai/ASP-competition.
Just like the first ASP-competition (http://asparagus.cs.uni-potsdam.de/contest/), it will be a SAT-competition-like event. However, there will be only one problem category : "Model and Solve" ; and the competition is open for any kind of solver and language. This is a chance for each community to show the strenght of its applications and solvers and to challenge the other communities. For more details of the competition see below.
A rought time table for the competition is below (subject to change):
- Until 15/02/2000: submission and selection of benchmark problems
- From 15/02/2009 till 1/5/2009: start of "dry-run" periode. Participants install and test their solvers and programs on the
- K.U.Leuven pool
- 1/5/2009: Start of the tests.
- 15/9/2009: announcement of the results at the LPNMR09 conference, Potsdam, 14-18 September, (http://www.cs.uni-potsdam.de/lpnmr09/)
research community. In the first place, we are looking for people that can contribute in creating a representative collection of benchmark problems and would be willing to provide support for these. In particular, we sollicit for the following:
- benchmark problems: decision or optimization problems (see below)
- a test program that can verify if a computed witness is a correct solution for the problem (and, in case of an optimisation problem, the program should be able to compute the "quality" of the answer)
- a set of instances for the problem, for use during the dry-run and for the contest itself.
- preferably a demonstration that the benchmark problem can effectively be solved.
You can forward your problems to marcd [ at ] cs.kuleuven.be
Here follow some further details. The competition is a simple "Model and Solve" competition:
- A number of benchmark problems will be made available on the website of the contest. The benchmark problems are search or optimisation problems. They will be specified in (non-ambiguous) natural language.
- Each participating team will submit a solver and a set of theories/programs modeling and solving each benchmark problem. During a "dry-run" period prior to the competition, each team will be able to install and test their solver+programs on a number of instances that will be provided for this purpose.
- In case of a search problem, a system will return either "Unsatisfiable" or "Satisfiable". In the latter case, the system should also generate a witness for the problem. The input problem instances of each benchmark problem, will be presented in the form of a set of atoms in a predefined input vocabulary. A witness will be represented in a similar format, as a set of atoms in some predefined output vocabulary.
- For an optimization problem, the input and output are similar, except that in case of "Satisfiable", a system may output a sequence of witnessses (hopefully of increasing quality). The last one in this list will be viewed as the proposed solution.
- In the last phase of the contest, all solvers will be tested on a number of new and unknown instances for each of the benchmark problems.
- The details for the ranking still have to be worked out, but the philosophy is that the solver that solves most problems wins.
Java Constraint Programming
Communicated by Radoslaw Szymanek
URL: http://www.jacop.eu
We are happy to announce that the Java Constraint Programming (JaCoP) solver is now available under an Open Source license, namely the Affero GNU GPL license. It is essentially a Java-based Constraint Programming solver over Finite Domains. For more details about JaCoP please visit www.jacop.eu . Feel free to download the newest version of JaCoP and experiment with it. You are welcome to register to the jacop twiki to get support from the core developers and JaCoP users.
The authors of JaCoP are actively seeking and implementing many interesting solver techniques from the Constraint Programming
community. The newest version of JaCoP has many features, such as pruning events, multiple constraint queues, special data structures to handle backtracking efficiently, incremental constraint processing, and many more. We often have to adapt published techniques so they can be efficiently used in the context of Java (specially its garbage collection techniques) and the JaCoP architecture. JaCoP has a number of global constraints implemented such as among, cumulative, element, circuit, assignment, the global cardinality constraint, two different versions of diffn, the regular constraint, the stretch constraint, the sequence constraint, three different versions of alldifferent, and two different versions of the sum constraint, both negative and positive table constraints. The positive table constraint has three most recently published variants of this constraint implemented. The different versions of the constraint implement different consistency methods with different computational and space complexities. JaCoP solver consists of over 60.000 lines of code developed over the span of eight years mostly by two people, Krzysztof Kuchcinski and Radoslaw
Szymanek. There is a number of Examples which can be used to learn CP and JaCoP, which contribute additional 16.000 lines of code.
The main focus of JaCoP is ease of use, ease of maintenance, ease of extension, and, last but not least, efficiency. We believe it is a
good tool to implement new techniques and develop new research ideas, both in constraint programming and in other areas. Feel free to contact Radoslaw Szymanek, one of the core developers, if you need help in implementing your research idea. We will try our best to help you if you agree to share your work (and Copyright) with us and the community. JaCoP has been used in teaching, research, and is being evaluated by industry.
Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computational Logic
Communicated by Joe Halpern
URL: http://www.acm.org/pubs/tocl/
Deadline: May 1st, 2009
Nominations (including self nominations) are invited for the next Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (ToCL): http://www.acm.org/pubs/tocl/. The position is for a term (renewable once) of three years, starting on July 1, 2009.
Candidates should be well-established researchers in areas related to computational logic, broadly conceived, and should have sufficient experience serving on conference program committees and journal editorial boards. Nominations, including a current curriculum vita and a brief (one page) statement of vision for ToCL, should be sent to Joseph Halpern <halpern@cs.cornell.edu>, by May 1, 2009.
Final selection will be made by a Selection Committee, consisting of Joseph Halpern (chair -- Cornell University), Kryzsztof Apt (CWI), Prakash Panangaden (McGill University), and Gordon Plotkin (University of Edinburgh). Nominations received after May 1, 2009, will be considered up until the position is filled.
ALP Web Site Designer
Communicated by Enrico Pontelli
The Association of Logic Programming is seeking to hire a web designer that is willing to work with the Executive Committee in redesigning and rebuilding the Association's Web site (volunteers are welcome too...).
If you are interested, please send a note of interest to Enrico Pontelli (epontell aT cs DOT nmsu DOT edu), possibly by October 15th, 2008. Please include in your note of interest an indication of your experience in web design (and possibly a collection of URLs representing a portfolio of your developments).