TOAST: applying answer set programming to superoptimisation

  • Authors:
  • Martin Brain;Tom Crick;Marina De Vos;John Fitch

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, Bath, UK;Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, Bath, UK;Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, Bath, UK;Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, Bath, UK

  • Venue:
  • ICLP'06 Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Logic Programming
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Answer set programming (ASP) is a form of declarative programming particularly suited to difficult combinatorial search problems. However, it has yet to be used for more than a handful of large-scale applications, which are needed to demonstrate the strengths of ASP and to motivate the development of tools and methodology. This paper describes such a large-scale application, the TOAST (Total Optimisation using Answer Set Technology) system, which seeks to generate optimal machine code for simple, acyclic functions using a technique known as superoptimisation. ASP is used as a scalable computational engine to handle searching over complex, non-regular search spaces, with the experimental results suggesting that this is a viable approach to the optimisation problem and demonstrates the scalability of a variety of solvers.