Abstract
Felicitous models were defined by Kit Fine in 1987 for the purpose of describing the semantics of negation in the programming language Prolog. They are often referred to as stable models, or answer sets. Years later, sophisticated software systems for generating answer sets were designed, and they became the basis of a new programming paradigm, called answer set programming. That programming method is used now for solving computational problems in many areas of science and technology. This chapter traces the early history of felicitous models and the ways in which that idea contributed to computer science.
To the memory of Brian Michael Goldberg.
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Notes
- 1.
Fine’s paper was presented at the Eighth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, held in 1987. Bidoit and Froidevaix described their work at the Second Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science the same year. Gelfond’s paper was given at the AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, in 1987 as well. The paper by Gelfond and Lifschitz was initially submitted to the Seventh ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems and became “one of the papers which time considerations prevented from being presented at the Symposium”; in 1988 it was contributed to the International Logic Programming Conference and Symposium.
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Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Federico Faroldi, Kit Fine, Michael Gelfond, Frederik Van De Putte, and the anonymous referees for their comments on drafts of this chapter.
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Lifschitz, V. (2023). From Felicitous Models to Answer Set Programming. In: Faroldi, F.L.G., Van De Putte, F. (eds) Kit Fine on Truthmakers, Relevance, and Non-classical Logic. Outstanding Contributions to Logic, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29415-0_5
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