Time and Place: TTh 10:30-11:45 a.m., BYAC 240
Instructor: Joohyung Lee (joolee (at) asu (dot) edu)
Instructor's Office Hours: W 5-6 p.m., F 1-2 p.m., and by appointment (preferably made at least one day ahead), BY 574.
Description: Beyond the study of proofs in mathematics, logic has been applied to designing and reasoning about computer hardware and software. One of the prominent applications of logic in computer science is the use of logic for declarative programming.
Answer set programming (ASP) is a recent form of declarative programming oriented towards difficult combinatorial search problems, and has found to be useful in many knowledge-intensive applications. It has emerged from interaction between two lines of research---on the semantics of negation in logic programming and on applications of satisfiability solvers to search problems. The idea of ASP is to represent the search problem we are interested in as a logic program whose intended models, known as ``answer sets'', correspond to the solutions of the problem, and then find them using an answer set solver -- a system for computing answer sets. Applications of ASP include knowledge representation, plan generation, and product configuration problems in artificial intelligence and to graph-theoretic problems arising in VLSI design, in historical linguistics, and in bioinformatics. Fully declarative semantics of ASP makes it easy to write provably correct programs, and allows easy communication between other users of computational methods besides computer scientists. The significance of this new approach is heightened by the multidisciplinary nature of collaborations and new computing areas that are emerging. For example,
There will be no textbook; the necessary material will be handed out in class. No prerequisite is needed, but general knowledge of mathematical logic is recommended. Your grade will be determined by class participation, homework, two tests and one term project.