Item — HN Reader

Im over 35 years of age. I have 15+ years of programming experience. And I generally consider myself as someone who has good breadth of tech in general. Yet, this is the first time in my life I've heard of ASP. And gosh. I was completely blown away by this as I read more about it and went through some examples (https://github.com/domoritz/clingo-wasm/blob/main/examples/e...)

Therefore, like a good little llm bitch that I have become recently, I straight away went to chatgpt/sonnet/gemini and asked them to compile me a list of more such "whatever this is known as". And holy cow!! This is a whole new world.

My ask to HN community: any good book recommendations related to "such stuff"? Not those research kinds as I don't have enough brain cells for it. But, a little easier and practical ones?

Thanks..

3 comments

The more recent Lifschitz book is the easiest to learn from IMO:

- https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/teaching/378/ASP.pdf

It starts with basics of using ASP and gives examples in clingo, not math.

The Potassco book is more comprehensive and will help you understand better what is going on:

- https://potassco.org/book/

Things I don't like include that it's more dense, doesn't use clingo examples (mostly math-style examples so you kind of have to translate them in your head), and while the proofs of how grounding works are interesting, the explanations are kind of short and don't always have the intuition I want.

I still think this is the authoritative reference.

The "how to build your own ASP system" paper is a good breakdown of how to integrate ASP into other projects:

- https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06692

The Potassco folks are doing amazing work maintaining these tools. I also wish more people knew about them.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that specifically for games stuff like enclose.horse, look at Adam Smith's Applied ASP Course from UCSC:

- https://canvas.ucsc.edu/courses/1338

Forgot to mention that one... we use clingo in Spack for dependency solving and other applications frequently slip my mind.

Thank you.. Have noted these down.

The pre-machine-learning formulations of AI focused on symbolic reasoning through the dual problems of search and logic. Many problems can be reduced to enumerating legal steps, and SAT/SMT/ASP and related systems can churn through those in a highly optimized and genetic manner.

Thanks... noted a few keywords to expand on further:

1. Symbolic reasoning

2. SAT/SMT/ASP

3. pre-machine-learning formulations of AI

"Logic programming"[0] is what I've always heard this stuff called. I was introduced to it with Prolog.

"Declarative programming"[1] is kind of a superset of logic programming, which may or may not be the aspect that piques your interest.

"Constraint programming"[2] and "Constraint logic programming"[3] are also a perspective on it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_programming

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_logic_programming

Thanks a lot. These are what I was hoping to know.

Has to be my favourite comment, haha!