Abstract:Answer set programming (ASP) is a logic programming paradigm under answer set semantics, which can be utilized in the field of non-monotonic reasoning and declarative problem solving, etc. This paper proposes and implements a cycle breaking heuristic and a bottom-restricted look-ahead procedure for ASP, and the resulting system is called LPS. The experimental results show that, relative to other state-of-the-art ASP systems, LPS could efficiently solve logic programs in phase transition hard-job-regions, and these programs are generally considered difficult to compute. In addition, by applying the so-called dynamic variable filtering (DVF) technique, LPS could greatly reduce the search tree size during the computation.