22,155 research outputs found
Dynamic Backtracking
Because of their occasional need to return to shallow points in a search
tree, existing backtracking methods can sometimes erase meaningful progress
toward solving a search problem. In this paper, we present a method by which
backtrack points can be moved deeper in the search space, thereby avoiding this
difficulty. The technique developed is a variant of dependency-directed
backtracking that uses only polynomial space while still providing useful
control information and retaining the completeness guarantees provided by
earlier approaches.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for an online appendix and other files
accompanying this articl
Intelligent search strategies based on adaptive Constraint Handling Rules
The most advanced implementation of adaptive constraint processing with
Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) allows the application of intelligent search
strategies to solve Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP). This presentation
compares an improved version of conflict-directed backjumping and two variants
of dynamic backtracking with respect to chronological backtracking on some of
the AIM instances which are a benchmark set of random 3-SAT problems. A CHR
implementation of a Boolean constraint solver combined with these different
search strategies in Java is thus being compared with a CHR implementation of
the same Boolean constraint solver combined with chronological backtracking in
SICStus Prolog. This comparison shows that the addition of ``intelligence'' to
the search process may reduce the number of search steps dramatically.
Furthermore, the runtime of their Java implementations is in most cases faster
than the implementations of chronological backtracking. More specifically,
conflict-directed backjumping is even faster than the SICStus Prolog
implementation of chronological backtracking, although our Java implementation
of CHR lacks the optimisations made in the SICStus Prolog system. To appear in
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).Comment: Number of pages: 27 Number of figures: 14 Number of Tables:
DynABT: dynamic asynchronous backtracking for dynamic DisCSPs.
Constraint Satisfaction has been widely used to model static combinatorial problems. However, many AI problems are dynamic and take place in a distributed environment, i.e. the problems are distributed over a number of agents and change over time. Dynamic Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems (DDisCSP) [1] are an emerging field for the resolution problems that are dynamic and distributed in nature. In this paper, we propose DynABT, a new Asynchronous algorithm for DDisCSPs which combines solution and reasoning reuse i.e. it handles problem changes by modifying the existing solution while re-using knowledge gained from solving the original (unchanged) problem. The benefits obtained from this approach are two-fold: (i) new solutions are obtained at a lesser cost and; (ii) resulting solutions are stable i.e. close to previous solutions. DynABT has been empirically evaluated on problems of varying difficulty and several degrees of changes has been found to be competitive for the problem classes tested
CHR as grammar formalism. A first report
Grammars written as Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) can be executed as
efficient and robust bottom-up parsers that provide a straightforward,
non-backtracking treatment of ambiguity. Abduction with integrity constraints
as well as other dynamic hypothesis generation techniques fit naturally into
such grammars and are exemplified for anaphora resolution, coordination and
text interpretation.Comment: 12 pages. Presented at ERCIM Workshop on Constraints, Prague, Czech
Republic, June 18-20, 200
Browser-based Analysis of Web Framework Applications
Although web applications evolved to mature solutions providing sophisticated
user experience, they also became complex for the same reason. Complexity
primarily affects the server-side generation of dynamic pages as they are
aggregated from multiple sources and as there are lots of possible processing
paths depending on parameters. Browser-based tests are an adequate instrument
to detect errors within generated web pages considering the server-side process
and path complexity a black box. However, these tests do not detect the cause
of an error which has to be located manually instead. This paper proposes to
generate metadata on the paths and parts involved during server-side processing
to facilitate backtracking origins of detected errors at development time.
While there are several possible points of interest to observe for
backtracking, this paper focuses user interface components of web frameworks.Comment: In Proceedings TAV-WEB 2010, arXiv:1009.330
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Experimental evaluation of preprocessing algorithms for constraint satisfaction problems
This paper presents an experimental evaluation of two orthogonal schemes for preprocessing constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). The first of these schemes involves a class of local consistency techniques that includes directional arc consistency, directional path consistency, and adaptive consistency. The other scheme concerns the prearrangement of variables in a linear order to facilitate an efficient search. In the first series of experiments, we evaluated the effect of each of the local consistency techniques on backtracking and its common enhancement, backjumping. Surprizingly, although adaptive consistency has the best worst-case complexity bounds, we have found that it exhibits the worst performance, unless the constraint graph was very sparse. Directional arc consistency (followed by either backjumping or backtracking) and backjumping (without any pre-processing) outperformed all other techniques; moreover, the former dominated the latter in computationally intensive situations. The second series of experiments suggests that maximum cardinality and minimum width arc the best pre-ordering (i.e., static ordering) strategies, while dynamic search rearrangement is superior to all the preorderings studied
Heuristic Backtracking Algorithms for SAT
In recent years backtrack search SAT solvers have been the subject of dramatic improvements. These improvements allowed SAT solvers to successfully replace BDDs in many areas of formal verification, and also motivated the development of many new challenging problem instances, many of which too hard for the current generation of SAT solvers. As a result, further improvements to SAT technology are expected to have key consequences in formal verification. The objective of this paper is to propose heuristic approaches to the backtrack step of backtrack search SAT solvers, with the goal of increasing the ability of the SAT solver to search different parts of the search space. The proposed heuristics to the backtrack step are inspired by the heuristics proposed in recent years for the branching step of SAT solvers, namely VSIDS and some of its improvements. The preliminary experimental results are promising, and motivate the integration of heuristic backtracking in state-of-the-art SAT solvers. 1
Random walks on dynamic configuration models: a trichotomy
We consider a dynamic random graph on vertices that is obtained by
starting from a random graph generated according to the configuration model
with a prescribed degree sequence and at each unit of time randomly rewiring a
fraction of the edges. We are interested in the mixing time of a
random walk without backtracking on this dynamic random graph in the limit as
, when is chosen such that . In [1] we found that, under mild regularity
conditions on the degree sequence, the mixing time is of order
when . In the present paper we investigate
what happens when . It turns out that the mixing time is
of order , with the scaled mixing time exhibiting a one-sided cutoff
when and a two-sided cutoff when . The
occurrence of a one-sided cutoff is a rare phenomenon. In our setting it comes
from a competition between the time scales of mixing on the static graph, as
identified by Ben-Hamou and Salez [4], and the regeneration time of first
stepping across a rewired edge.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure
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