Stable models and circumscription

The concept of a stable model provided a declarative semantics for Prolog programs with negation as failure and became a starting point for the development of answer set programming. In this paper we propose a new definition of that concept, which covers many constructs used in answer set programming and, unlike the original definition, refers neither to grounding nor to fixpoints. It is based on a syntactic transformation similar to parallel circumscription.

Authors

• Paolo Ferraris
• Joohyung Lee
• Vladimir Lifschitz

Keywords

• Answer set programming
• Circumscription
• Nonmonotonic reasoning
• Program completion
• Stable models