Winning Snake: Design Choices in Multi-Shot ASP

TL;DR

This paper explores various multi-shot answer set programming techniques through implementing the Snake game, demonstrating how different design choices impact performance and visual representation in solving an NP-hard problem.

Contribution

It presents five different multi-shot ASP implementations for Snake, comparing their performance and illustrating the use of clingraph for visualizing game progress.

Findings

Performance varies significantly across implementations

Visual representations aid understanding of game state

Multi-shot techniques effectively solve NP-hard problems in game contexts

Abstract

Answer set programming is a well-understood and established problem-solving and knowledge representation paradigm. It has become more prominent amongst a wider audience due to its multiple applications in science and industry. The constant development of advanced programming and modeling techniques extends the toolset for developers and users regularly. This paper demonstrates different techniques to reuse logic program parts (multi-shot) by solving the arcade game snake. This game is particularly interesting because a victory can be assured by solving the underlying NP-hard problem of Hamiltonian Cycles. We will demonstrate five hands-on implementations in clingo and compare their performance in an empirical evaluation. In addition, our implementation utilizes clingraph to generate a simple yet informative image representation of the game's progress.