A Brief History of Updates of Answer-Set Programs
This is an incremental review for researchers in logic programming and AI, addressing challenges in program updates without new solutions.
The paper overviews approaches and results for updating answer-set programs under stable model semantics, highlighting the lack of a unifying framework for belief and rule updates.
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.