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Constraint Programming: Services

We offer a number of services that will help you understand and practise the contents of the lecture. We recommend you to make use of as many of these services as possible.

Assignments

Assignments encourage you to test your understanding of the concepts covered in the lecture, and to practise the methods we discuss.

A new assignment will be published every week. After one week, we will publish a sample solution that you can compare your own solutions to. If you have further questions, you can discuss them in the tutorial, during the office hours, and on the mailing list.

Most assignments will require you to write code in Alice ML.

The lecture notes and assignments are partly based on the slides Christian Schulte prepared for courses at KTH, Sweden. You find a lot of additional material on his course web site.

Alice/Gecode update

For the time until the next release of Alice, we provide updated packages that contain the most recent versions of Gecode and the Alice Explorer. You must install these packages in order to solve assignment 8, because we made substantial bug fixes for the set constraints.

• For Windows, download alice-gecode-update-win.zip and unpack it to the directory where the Alice library is installed. This is typically C:\Program Files\Alice\share\lib.
• For Linux, download alice-gecode-update-linux.tar.gz and unpack it in the root directory.
• For MacOS, download alice-gecode-update-mac.0.2.zip and follow the instructions.

Ecode

Ecode is the educational constraint development environment. It is implemented in Alice, and you can use it to learn how a constraint system is organized as well as to quickly implement new propagation algorithms. Ecode is available for download.

Dominance constraints

The lecture on dominance constraints (Lecture 9) was based on Chapters 6 and 7 of Sven Thiel's dissertation Efficient Algorithms for Constraint Propagation and for Processing Tree Descriptions.

Tutorial

The tutorial is the prime place to discuss the assigments, and to ask any other content-related questions about the lecture. The tutorial usually takes about an hour. The tutors for this lecture are Marco Kuhlmann and Guido Tack (see the main page for their e-mail addresses).

Office Hours

During our office hours, we can give you direct support. You may, for example, want to

• resolve individual problems you might have with the lecture,
• discuss alternative solutions to the assignments,
• ask advanced questions about the contents of the lecture.

Please see the main page to find out about the time slots for our office hours.

Mailing list

Subscribing to the mailing list is highly recommended. You can use the list to ask any questions you might have about the lecture. We will use it to make important announcements.

Click here to subscribe to or unsubscribe from the mailing list, or to visit the list archives.