Preliminary Report on WASP 2.0

TL;DR

This paper reports on the ongoing development of the WASP ASP solver, highlighting recent improvements in core evaluation algorithms that significantly enhance its performance on benchmark problems.

Contribution

It introduces a refactored version of WASP with optimized core algorithms, demonstrating substantial performance gains on NP-class benchmarks.

Findings

WASP's new version outperforms previous versions on benchmark tests.

Refactoring improved the core evaluation algorithms.

Performance on NP-class benchmarks has significantly increased.

Abstract

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative programming paradigm. The intrinsic complexity of the evaluation of ASP programs makes the development of more effective and faster systems a challenging research topic. This paper reports on the recent improvements of the ASP solver WASP. WASP is undergoing a refactoring process which will end up in the release of a new and more performant version of the software. In particular the paper focus on the improvements to the core evaluation algorithms working on normal programs. A preliminary experiment on benchmarks from the 3rd ASP competition belonging to the NP class is reported. The previous version of WASP was often not competitive with alternative solutions on this class. The new version of WASP shows a substantial increase in performance.