Discovering classes of strongly equivalent logic programs with negation as failure in the head

Abstract

In this paper, we apply Fangzhen Lin’s methodology of computer aided theorem discovery to discover classes of strongly equivalent logic programs with negation as failure in the head. Specifically, with the help of computers, we discover exact conditions that capture the strong equivalence between small sets of rules, which have potential applications in the theory and practice of logic programming. In the experiment, we extend the previous approach to semi-automatically generate plausible conjectures. We also show that it is possible to divide the original problem in simpler cases and combine their solutions in order to obtain the solution of the original problem.