Philosophy of the MiniZinc challenge. (English) Zbl 1208.68207
Summary: MiniZinc arose as a response to the extended discussion at CP2006 of the need for a standard modelling language for CP. This is a challenging problem, and we believe MiniZinc makes a good attempt to handle the most obvious obstacle: there are hundreds of potential global constraints, most handled by few or no systems. A standard input language for solvers gives us the capability to compare different solvers. Hence, every year since 2008 we have run the MiniZinc Challenge comparing different solvers that support MiniZinc. In this report we discuss the philosophy behind the challenge, why we do it, how we do it, and why we do it that way.
MSC:
| 68T20 | Problem solving in the context of artificial intelligence (heuristics, search strategies, etc.) |
References:
| [1] | Apt, K., & Wallace, M. (2007). Constraint logic programming using ECLiPSe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. · Zbl 1119.68044 |
| [2] | Fourth international CSP solver competition (2009). http://www.cril.univ-artois.fr/CPAI09/ . |
| [3] | Huang, J. (2008). Universal booleanization of constraint models. In P. Stuckey (Ed.), 14th int. conf. on principles and practice of constraint programming (CP’08), LNCS (Vol. 5202, pp. 144–158). Heidelberg: Springer. |
| [4] | JaCoP Java Constraint Programming Solver (2010). http://jacop.osolpro.com/ . |
| [5] | Minizinc challenge (2009). http://www.g12.csse.unimelb.edu.au/minizinc/challenge2009/challenge.html . |
| [6] | Minizinc + Flatzinc (2010). http://www.g12.csse.unimelb.edu.au/minizinc/ . |
| [7] | Nethercote, N., Stuckey, P., Becket, R., Brand, S., Duck, G., & Tack, G. (2007). Minizinc: Towards a standard CP modelling language. In C. Bessiere (Ed.), Proceedings of the 13th international conference on principles and practice of constraint programming, LNCS (Vol. 4741, pp. 529–543). Heidelberg: Springer. |
| [8] | SCIP (2010). Solving constraint integer programs. http://scip.zib.de/scip.shtml . |
| [9] | Schulte, C., Lagerkvist, M., & Tack, G. (2010). Gecode. http://www.gecode.org/ . |
| [10] | SICStus Prolog (2010). http://www.sics.se/sisctus/ . |
| [11] | Simonis, H. (2009). A hybrid constraint model fo the routing and wavelength assignment problem. In I. Gent (Ed.), Proceedings of the 15th international conference on principles and practice of constraint programming, LNCS (Vol. 5732, pp. 104–118). Heidelberg: Springer. |
| [12] | Smith, B., & Gent, I. (2005). Constraint modelling challenge 2005. www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/\(\sim\)ipg/challenge/ . |
| [13] | Third international CSP solver competition (2008). http://www.cril.univ-artois.fr/CPAI08/ . |
| [14] | Van Gelder, A., Le Berre, D., Biere, A., Kullmann, O., & Simon, L. (2005). Purse-based scoring for comparison of exponential-time programs. http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/\(\sim\)avg/purse-poster.pdf . |
| [15] | XCSP 2.1 (2008). http://www.cril.univ-artois.fr/CPAI08/XCSP2_1.pdf . |
This reference list is based on information provided by the publisher or from digital mathematics libraries. Its items are heuristically matched to zbMATH identifiers and may contain data conversion errors. In some cases that data have been complemented/enhanced by data from zbMATH Open. This attempts to reflect the references listed in the original paper as accurately as possible without claiming completeness or a perfect matching.
