Abstract
Studying the performance of logic tools on solving a specific problem can bring new insights on the use of different paradigms. This paper provides an empirical evaluation of logic-based encodings for a well known board game: Ricochet Robots. Ricochet Robots is a board game where the goal is to find the smallest number of moves needed for one robot to move from the initial position to a target position, while taking into account the existing barriers and other robots. Finding a solution to the Ricochet Robots problem is NP-hard. In this work we develop logic-based encodings for the Ricochet Robots problem to feed into Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solvers. When appropriate, advanced techniques are applied to further boost the performance of a solver. A comparison between the performance of SAT solvers and an existing ASP solution clearly shows that SAT is by far the more adequate technology to solve the Ricochet Robots problem.
Filipe Gouveia
Computer Science Researcher
My research interests include artificial intelligence, computational logic and automated reasoning.