chapter 11

Tractable Constraint Languages

David Cohen,     Royal Holloway, University of London

Peter Jeavons,     Oxford University Computing Laboratory

The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression.

Eugene Wigner

Practical constraint solvers allow you to define constraint networks and (with luck) solve them. They often define a set of basic constraints that you can apply to variables. These basic constraints may well be called the language of the constraint solver.

Naturally you want to be able to offer some performance guarantees when you generate a constraint network model of a real-world problem using your constraint language. However, if the language allows arbitrary ...

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