anthem: Transforming gringo Programs into First-Order Theories (Preliminary Report)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to transform gringo programs into first-order theories to facilitate understanding, verification, and correctness checking using automated reasoning tools.

Contribution

It presents an approach to automate the generation and simplification of completion formulas for gringo programs, aiding program analysis and verification.

Findings

Automated generation of completion formulas for gringo programs.

Simplification techniques for these formulas.

Potential for improved program correctness verification.

Abstract

In a recent paper by Harrison et al., the concept of program completion is extended to a large class of programs in the input language of the ASP grounder gringo. We would like to automate the process of generating and simplifying completion formulas for programs in that language, because examining the output produced by this kind of software may help programmers to see more clearly what their program does and to what degree its set of stable models conforms with their intentions. If a formal specification for the program is available, then it may be possible to use this software, in combination with automated reasoning tools, to verify that the program is correct. This note is a preliminary report on a project motivated by this idea.