The Well-Founded Semantics Coincides with the Three-Valued Stable Semantics

We introduce 3-valued stable models which are a natural generalization of standard (2-valued) stable models. We show that every logic program P has at least one 3-valued stable model and that the well-founded model of any program P VGRS90] coincides with the smallest 3-valued stable model of P. We conclude that the well-founded semantics of an arbitrary logic program coincides with the 3-valued stable model semantics. The 3-valued stable semantics is closely related to non-monotonic formalisms in AI. Namely, every program P can be translated into a suitable autoepistemic (resp. default) theory ^ P so that the 3-valued stable semantics of P coincides with the (3-valued) autoepistemic (resp. default) semantics of ^ P. Similar results hold for circumscrip-tion and CWA. Moreover, it can be shown that the 3-valued stable semantics has a natural extension to the class of all disjunctive logic programs and deductive databases. 1 Finally, following upon the recent approach developed by Gelfond and Lifschitz, we extend all of our results to more general logic programs which, in addition to the use of negation as failure, permit the use of classical negation.