Answer Set Programming for Egg Extraction and More

Three years ago, Philip Zucker posted an attempt to use answer set programming (ASP) for term extraction from e-graphs Although the task is NP-hard and ASP offers a natural modelling of e-graph terms, the initial attempt did not yield convincing results. From the aspect of practical ASP users, we first pinpoint the way to make ASP work and work well on the task of e-graph extraction. The initial results show the na\"ive ASP encoding is comparable on efficiency to the well-optimised ILP-based exact DAG extraction in the extraction-gym, and find several extra optimal extraction on the complex instances. This leads us to a further agenda: with the "better together of egg+Datalog", is there a better "better together" by having ASP as a more powerful Datalog? We discuss the potential benefit from each other.