A Brief History of Updates of Answer-Set Programs

TL;DR

This paper reviews the evolution of methods for updating answer-set programs, highlighting key approaches, challenges, and the lack of a unified framework for belief and rule updates in logic programming.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the main approaches and challenges in updating answer-set programs over the past decades.

Findings

Different principles underpin current update approaches.

No unified framework exists for belief and rule updates.

Main challenges include formalization and computational complexity.

Abstract

Over the last couple of decades, there has been a considerable effort devoted to the problem of updating logic programs under the stable model semantics (a.k.a. answer-set programs) or, in other words, the problem of characterising the result of bringing up-to-date a logic program when the world it describes changes. Whereas the state-of-the-art approaches are guided by the same basic intuitions and aspirations as belief updates in the context of classical logic, they build upon fundamentally different principles and methods, which have prevented a unifying framework that could embrace both belief and rule updates. In this paper, we will overview some of the main approaches and results related to answer-set programming updates, while pointing out some of the main challenges that research in this topic has faced.