An Advanced Disjunctive Magic-Set Method and Its Implementation Embedded in the DLV System

This page describes an advanced Magic-Set method and its implementation, which has been embedded into the DLV system by Chiara Cumbo, Wolfgang Faber, Gianluigi Greco, Nicola Leone, and Mario Alviano.

Prototype

We provide a prototype system available for download: Linux i386 version.

Experiments

We have performed several experiments, comparing our implementation to evaluation without Magic-Set and to a previous Magic-Set proposal by Sergio Greco.

Some of the instances we used are available for the problems: Ancestor, SimplePath, StrategicCompanies.

Usage

We refer to our Magic-Set method by notation DMS and to our optimized Magic-Set method by notation ODMS. ODMS will be applied by default. For using DMS (without the optimizations) use command line option -ODMS, for explicitly requesting ODMS (even if it is the default) use -OODMS . To turn off magic sets, use -OMS-.

Since a Disjunctive Datalog program may have more than one answer set there are different reasoning modes (brave/credulous and cautious/skeptical) to decide whether a query is satisfied. In order to choose the appropriate one, you have to specify (on the command line) -FB or -FC, respectively. If you know that your program has exactly one answer set, just use -FB.

We would like to point out that the magic set optimization will be performed only if the program is positive and has no integrity constraints and occurrences of strong negation. Disjunction is, however, supported (and the main target of our work).

We suggest to run an example to get familiar with the system.

For instance, for running the first Ancestor problem instance with Disjunctive Magic-Sets under brave reasoning use the command line:

 DLVmagic -FB S100 -ODMS

For instance, for running the same problem with Optimized Disjunctive Magic-Sets under cautious reasoning use this command line:

 DLVmagic -FC S100 -OODMS

For further informations about DLV's general options and usage, please refer to DLV online manual.


wf@wfaber.com
Last modified 2009-02-01

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