Submission and Participation

We strongly encourage to contribute to the competition in two ways:

in submitting or designing new benchmarks and
in submitting new or updating already running solvers.

The benchmarks for the competition will be collected on the Asparagus platform.
Although benchmarks can be submitted anytime to the Asparagus team, only those submitted before the deadline can be taken into account for the competition. The inclusion of benchmarks into Asparagus is subject to the approval by the Competition or the Asparagus steering committee, respectively. It is advisable to first contact the Asparagus team by email (asparagus@cs.uni-potsdam.de) in order to agree upon the upload of the benchmarks.

For all problem classes (MGS, SCore, and SLparse), we appreciate submissions of non-ground problem encodings and ground problem instances in separate files. However, we can also accept ground programs (SCore and SLparse), possibly in lparse format (SLparse). To add a problem to the MGS class, you will have to provide

a textual problem description that also specifies the names and arguments of input and output predicates and
a set of ground instances (using only input predicates) of your problem.

The submission of a problem encoding is optional and left up to you. We are grateful if you can provide us with a correctness checker, that is, a program or a script able to decide whether the output predicates occurring in some answer set form a solution to a given instance of your problem.

In addition to benchmarks, solvers are collected via Asparagus. You can install your solver(s) at your convenience in Asparagus, once you have obtained an Asparagus account. For participating in the competition, simply

obtain an Asparagus account, unless you already have one, and
register for the respective competition classes.

For details on obtaining an Asparagus account and installing your solver(s), see the HOWTO page at the Asparagus website.
Solvers, already present in Asparagus, can be registered for the competition here: Registration.

Once you have an Asparagus account, different versions of your solver(s) may run on Asparagus (via different call scripts); up to three of them can be registered for each competition class. Please make sure that your call scripts accept input and produce output according to the Competition Format. (Even existent Asparagus users might have to add call scripts in order to meet the competition requirements!) For problems in the MGS class, you might also like to add encodings to Asparagus; one of the available encodings can be registered per MGS problem.