Logic Programming and Theorem Proving

This paper presents a new system, called the A-System, performing abductive reasoning within theframework of Abductive Logic Programming. It isbased on a hybrid computational model that imple-ments the abductive search in terms of two tightlycoupled processes: a reduction process of the high-level logical representation to a lower-level con-straint store and a lower-level constraint solvingprocess. A set of initial ”proof of principle” ex-periments demonstrate the versatility of the ap-proach stemming from its declarative representa-tion of problems and the good underlying compu-tational behaviour of the system. The approach of-fers a general methodology of declarative problemsolving in AI where an incremental and modular re-finement of the high-level representation with extradomain knowledge can improve and scale the com-putational performance of the framework.