Answer set programming at a glance

Can solving hard computational problems be made easy? If we restrict the scope of the question to computational problems that can be stated in terms of constraints over binary domains, and if we understand "easy" as "using a simple and intuitive modeling language that comes with software for processing programs in the language," then the answer is Yes! Answer Set Programming (ASP, for short) fits the bill. While already well represented at research conferences and workshops, ASP has been around for barely more than a decade. Its origins, however, go back a long time; it is an outcome of years of research in knowledge representation, logic programming, and constraint satisfaction-areas that sought and studied declarative languages to model domain knowledge, as well as general-purpose computational tools for processing programs and theories that represent problem specifications in these languages. ASP borrows from each of these areas, all the time aiming.