The paper evaluates the e ectiveness of learning for speeding up the solution of constraint satisfaction problems. It extends previous work (Dechter 1990) by introducing a new and powerful variant of learning and by presenting an extensive empirical study on much larger and more di cult problem instances. Our results show that learning can speed up backjumping when using either a xed or dynamic...

Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) was a composer of twelve-tone serial music noted for creating the all-partition array. One part of the problem in generating an all-partition array requires finding a covering of a pitch-class matrix by a collection of sets, each forming a region containing 12 distinct elements and corresponding to a distinct integer partition of 12. Constraint programming (CP) is a t...

A Mal’tsev operation is a ternary operation φ that satisfies the identities φ(x, y, y) = φ(y, y, x) = x. Constraint satisfaction problems involving constraints invariant under a Mal’tsev operation constitute an important class of constraint satisfaction problems, which includes the affine satisfiability problem, subgroup and near subgroup constraints, and many others. It is also known that any ...

This paper gives a brief survey of current research on the complexity of the constraint satisfaction problem over fixed constraint languages. §

This paper introduces restart and nogood recording techniques in the domain of qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning. Nogoods and restarts can be applied orthogonally to usual methods for solving qualitative constraint satisfaction problems. In particular, we propose a more general definition of nogoods that allows for exploiting information about nogoods and tractable subclasses during ba...

Local Consistency has proven to be an important notion in the study of constraint satisfaction problems. We give an algebraic condition that characterizes all the constraint types for which generalized arc-consistency is suucient to ensure the existence of a solution. We give some examples to illustrate the application of this result.

Recently, Fontaine has pointed out a connection between consistent query answering (CQA) and constraint satisfaction problems (CSP) [22]. We investigate this connection more closely, identifying classes of CQA problems based on denial constraints and GAV constraints that correspond exactly to CSPs in the sense that a complexity classification of the CQA problems in each class is equivalent (up ...

Constraint-based modelling techniques have been demonstrated a useful means to develop intelligent tutoring systems in several domains. However, when applying CBM to tasks which require students to explore a large solution space, this approach encounters its limitation: it is not well suited to hypothesize the solution variant intended by the student, and thus corrective feedback might be not i...

An instance of a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is variable k-consistent if any subinstance with at most k variables has a solution. For a fixed constraint language L, ρk(L) is the largest ratio such that any variable k-consistent instance has a solution that satisfies at least a fraction of ρk(L) of the constraints. We provide an expression for the limit ρ(L) := limk→∞ ρk(L), and show t...