Solving the Wise Mountain Man Riddle with Answer Set Programming

This paper describes an exercise in the formalization of common-sense with Answer Set Programming aimed at solving an interesting riddle, whose solution is not obvious to many people. Solving the riddle requires a considerable amount of common-sense knowledge and sophisticated knowledge representation and reasoning techniques, including planning and adversarial reasoning. Most importantly, the riddle is difficult enough to make it unclear, at a first analysis, whether and how Answer Set Programming or other formalisms can be used to solve it.