Information for Participants

This page describes how to participate in the challenge as someone who wants to solve problems. A participant can be a single person or a team of at most three persons.


The problem domains can be found here: Problem Domains

Deadline for alpha versions: 1st of April 2019!


Input Format

For all problem domains, an instance is given as a single file with filename extension .asp that contains a set of facts (EDBs) of form p(c1, ..., cn).

The details of the input format (input predicates and their arities) are problem-dependent and are described separately for the individual problem domains.


Output Format

The answer sets are expected to be printed in the following format (corresponding to the option --outf=1 of clingo and to the option --competition-output of DLV2), representing a simplified version of the output format used in the previous ASP Competition:

  • Each answer set is printed in two to four lines:
    • ANSWER (constant string)
    • A line containing the answer set as facts (i.e., atoms are terminated with a dot). Atoms are of form p(c1,...,cn).
    • COST integer@levelN integer@levelN-1 ... integer@level1 (specifies the costs of this answer set; only for optimisation problems; '@levels' can be omitted)
    • OPTIMUM (if this answer set is the proven optimium; only for optimisation problems)
  • If the instance was proved to be inconsistent, one line is printed:
    • INCONSISTENT
  • Comment lines starting with % can be printed
  • No commas or other delimiters, curly braces, blank lines, or any other symbols are printed
  • IMPORTANT: the stderror stream must be redirected to /dev/null


Sumission Guidelines

The challenge is run on https://www.starexec.org.

To participate, perform the following steps:

  • If you do not have an account yet, create one under some participant_name.
  • Send a request to join the community "ASP" in StarExec.
  • Let us know your StarExec participant_name (email to aspcomp2019@kr.tuwien.ac.at) such that we can give you access.

Then login and repeat the following steps for every problem you want to solve:

  1. For making a test submission, navigate to space "root/ASP/ASP Challenge 2019 Test Environment/[problem you want to solve]" (navigation bar on the left). You can make as many test submissions as you want.
  2. Open the solvers section, click "upload solver", and submit your solution as .zip, .tar or .tar.gz file using "[participant_name]" as solver name. The archive is expected in the following format:
    • It contains all solvers, other binaries, scripts, encodings and auxiliary files that belong to your solution
    • It contains a directory "bin" with a script file "starexec_run_[participant_name]" that serves as interface to the actual solver
    • An example of a .zip file can be found here.
  3. Create a job to test your submission.
  4. For the final submission, navigate to space "root/ASP/ASP Challenge 2019/[problem you want to solve]" and do the same as in 2. (only one submission per participant)

The platform will execute your submission by calling "bin/starexec_run_[participant_name] [instance]", where the working directory is the bin directory and [instance] is the path to an instance file.