Announcements

• This is the covering test paper that is referred to in the open assessment.

Unit 1: Introduction

• Lecture Notes: An Introduction to Constraint Programming (Lecture 15 Nov 2010)

• Lecture Notes: The Constraint Satisfaction Problem (Lecture 16 Nov 2010)

Unit 2: Building Correct Constraint Models

• Lecture Notes: Modelling with Constraints: Formulating Abstract Models (Lectures 16 & 19 Nov 2010)

• Lecture Notes: Introduction to the MiniZinc Modelling Language (Lectures 19 & 22 Nov 2010)

• Lecture Notes: Modelling with Constraints: Formulating Concrete Models 1 (Lectures 30 Nov & 3 Dec 2010)

• Lecture Notes: Modelling with Constraints: Formulating Concrete Models 2 (Lecture 3 Dec 2010)

• A very useful paper on the topic of modelling is Chapter 11 of the Handbook of Constraint Programming This chapter is written by Barbara Smith.

• If you want to test your sudoku solver, you can find some problem instance here and here.

• Here are some cryptarithmetic instances to test your solver on. In fact, you can find hundreds of instances generated by Naoyuki Tamura's puzzle generator. and Truman Collins' puzzle generator.

Unit 3: Translating Constraint Models to CSPs

• Translating a MiniZinc Specification to a CSP (Lecture 6 Dec 2010)

• Details of the MiniZinc translation process can be found in the document Converting MiniZinc to FlatZinc by Nicholas Nethercote. The most complex part of the conversion is the handling of annotations, but this will not concern us.

Unit 4: Solving CSPs

• Overview of Solution Methods (Lecture 6 Dec 2010)

• Lecture Notes: Problem Reduction (Lectures: 6 & 7 December 2010)

• Lecture Notes: Partial Assignment Search (Lectures: 7 & 10 December 2010)

• Problems on arc consistency | Solutions

• Problems on consistency | Solutions

Unit 5: Building Efficient Constraint Models