Re:Constraint Programming
by mzl on Monday September 12, 2022 @03:40PM
(#32815721)
I'm curious what you would have wanted MiniZinc to do?
In general, I think MiniZinc is great precisely because it is a structured way to generate a list of constraints, since this makes it possible to integrate into a variety of solvers. Sure, sometimes the generation and the interchange format can be a bit heavy and I would like better ways to manage that, but it is often still worth it IMHO.
The fact that the language is based on a relational semantics with the unfolding into a list of constraints as a model makes it possible to understand how predicates, nested Boolean contexts, reification, undefined expressions, and local variables all work in conjunction. It is a hard enough problem to solve as is, and I think adding semantic complexity on top of it would make it too hard to do.
In general, I think MiniZinc is great precisely because it is a structured way to generate a list of constraints, since this makes it possible to integrate into a variety of solvers. Sure, sometimes the generation and the interchange format can be a bit heavy and I would like better ways to manage that, but it is often still worth it IMHO.
The fact that the language is based on a relational semantics with the unfolding into a list of constraints as a model makes it possible to understand how predicates, nested Boolean contexts, reification, undefined expressions, and local variables all work in conjunction. It is a hard enough problem to solve as is, and I think adding semantic complexity on top of it would make it too hard to do.