1997], Refinements for Restart Model Elimination.pdf

Renements for Restart Model Elimination Peter Baumgartner
Ulrich Furbach Universita?t Koblenz
Institut fu?r Informatik Rheinau 1
D–56075 Koblenz
Germany E-mail: fpeter,ulig@informatik.uni-koblenz.de We present various refinements for the restart model elimination (RME) calculus and discuss their interrelationship. As a new variant of the calculus we introduce RME with early cancellation pruning and investigate its compatibility with the other refinements.1 Introduction Restart Model Elimination (RME) has been introduced as a variant of model elimination in [1] as a calculus which avoids contrapositives and which introduces case analysis. In [4] a variant for computing answers to disjunctive logic programs was introduced. RME is implemented as part of the PROTEIN system [2]. One result of this paper is a table of completeness results with respect to the combination of the refinements head selection function, strictness, regularity, independance of the goal clause for RME (Figure 1 below). Another original result is completeness of “early cancellation pruning” 1 . In the following section we recall basic restart model elimination calculus, and in Section 2.2 we introduce refinements. The main results of this paper are then presented in Section 3.2 Restart Model Elimination (RME) A pair of literals (K;L) is a connection with MGU σ iff σ is a most general unifier for K and L. A clause is considered as a multiset of literals, usually written as an implication A1_ : : :_Am B1^ : : :^Bn where the As and Bs are atoms. Clauses with m  1 are called program clauses with head literals Ai and body literals Bi, if present. Negative clauses are written as B1^ : : :^Bn. We assume our clause sets to be in Goal normal form, i.e. there exists only one negative clause which furthermore does not contain variables. Without loss of generality this can be achieved by introducing a new clause Goal where Goal is a new predicate symbol, and by replacing every negative clause B1