Minish HAT: A Tool for the Minimization of Here-and-There Logic Programs and Theories in Answer Set Programming

Abstract

[Abstract] When it comes to the writing of a new logic program or theory, it is of great importance to obtain a concise and minimal representation, for simplicity and ease of interpretation reasons. There are already a few methods and many tools, such as Karnaugh Maps or the Quine-McCluskey method, as well as their numerous software implementations, that solve this minimization problem in Boolean logic. This is not the case for Here-and-There logic, also called three-valued logic. Even though there are theoretical minimization methods for logic theories and programs, there aren’t any published tools that are able to obtain a minimal equivalent logic program. In this paper we present the first version of a tool called that is able to efficiently obtain minimal and equivalent representations for any logic program in Here-and-There. The described tool uses an hybrid method both leveraging a modified version of the Quine-McCluskey algorithm and Answer Set Programming techniques to minimize fairly complex logic programs in a reduced time.