Grounding Is the New Scaling: When Declarative Dreams Hit Memory Walls
Opening — Why this matters now Declarative AI has always promised elegance: you describe the problem, the machine finds the solution. Answer Set Programming (ASP) is perhaps the purest embodiment of that ideal. But as this paper makes painfully clear, elegance does not scale for free. In an era where industrial configuration problems easily exceed 30,000 components, ASP’s biggest enemy is not logic — it’s memory. Specifically, the grounding bottleneck. This article dissects why grounding, not solving, is the true scalability killer in ASP, and why a deceptively simple idea — constraint-aware guessing (CAG) — dramatically shifts the performance frontier. ...