62,814 research outputs found
Taming Numbers and Durations in the Model Checking Integrated Planning System
The Model Checking Integrated Planning System (MIPS) is a temporal least
commitment heuristic search planner based on a flexible object-oriented
workbench architecture. Its design clearly separates explicit and symbolic
directed exploration algorithms from the set of on-line and off-line computed
estimates and associated data structures. MIPS has shown distinguished
performance in the last two international planning competitions. In the last
event the description language was extended from pure propositional planning to
include numerical state variables, action durations, and plan quality objective
functions. Plans were no longer sequences of actions but time-stamped
schedules. As a participant of the fully automated track of the competition,
MIPS has proven to be a general system; in each track and every benchmark
domain it efficiently computed plans of remarkable quality. This article
introduces and analyzes the most important algorithmic novelties that were
necessary to tackle the new layers of expressiveness in the benchmark problems
and to achieve a high level of performance. The extensions include critical
path analysis of sequentially generated plans to generate corresponding optimal
parallel plans. The linear time algorithm to compute the parallel plan bypasses
known NP hardness results for partial ordering by scheduling plans with respect
to the set of actions and the imposed precedence relations. The efficiency of
this algorithm also allows us to improve the exploration guidance: for each
encountered planning state the corresponding approximate sequential plan is
scheduled. One major strength of MIPS is its static analysis phase that grounds
and simplifies parameterized predicates, functions and operators, that infers
knowledge to minimize the state description length, and that detects domain
object symmetries. The latter aspect is analyzed in detail. MIPS has been
developed to serve as a complete and optimal state space planner, with
admissible estimates, exploration engines and branching cuts. In the
competition version, however, certain performance compromises had to be made,
including floating point arithmetic, weighted heuristic search exploration
according to an inadmissible estimate and parameterized optimization
Shared Memory Parallel Subgraph Enumeration
The subgraph enumeration problem asks us to find all subgraphs of a target
graph that are isomorphic to a given pattern graph. Determining whether even
one such isomorphic subgraph exists is NP-complete---and therefore finding all
such subgraphs (if they exist) is a time-consuming task. Subgraph enumeration
has applications in many fields, including biochemistry and social networks,
and interestingly the fastest algorithms for solving the problem for
biochemical inputs are sequential. Since they depend on depth-first tree
traversal, an efficient parallelization is far from trivial. Nevertheless,
since important applications produce data sets with increasing difficulty,
parallelism seems beneficial.
We thus present here a shared-memory parallelization of the state-of-the-art
subgraph enumeration algorithms RI and RI-DS (a variant of RI for dense graphs)
by Bonnici et al. [BMC Bioinformatics, 2013]. Our strategy uses work stealing
and our implementation demonstrates a significant speedup on real-world
biochemical data---despite a highly irregular data access pattern. We also
improve RI-DS by pruning the search space better; this further improves the
empirical running times compared to the already highly tuned RI-DS.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures, To appear at the 7th IEEE Workshop on Parallel
/ Distributed Computing and Optimization (PDCO 2017
Involutive Bases Algorithm Incorporating F5 Criterion
Faugere's F5 algorithm is the fastest known algorithm to compute Groebner
bases. It has a signature-based and an incremental structure that allow to
apply the F5 criterion for deletion of unnecessary reductions. In this paper,
we present an involutive completion algorithm which outputs a minimal
involutive basis. Our completion algorithm has a nonincremental structure and
in addition to the involutive form of Buchberger's criteria it applies the F5
criterion whenever this criterion is applicable in the course of completion to
involution. In doing so, we use the G2V form of the F5 criterion developed by
Gao, Guan and Volny IV. To compare the proposed algorithm, via a set of
benchmarks, with the Gerdt-Blinkov involutive algorithm (which does not apply
the F5 criterion) we use implementations of both algorithms done on the same
platform in Maple.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figure
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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
From the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm to a Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz
The next few years will be exciting as prototype universal quantum processors
emerge, enabling implementation of a wider variety of algorithms. Of particular
interest are quantum heuristics, which require experimentation on quantum
hardware for their evaluation, and which have the potential to significantly
expand the breadth of quantum computing applications. A leading candidate is
Farhi et al.'s Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm, which alternates
between applying a cost-function-based Hamiltonian and a mixing Hamiltonian.
Here, we extend this framework to allow alternation between more general
families of operators. The essence of this extension, the Quantum Alternating
Operator Ansatz, is the consideration of general parametrized families of
unitaries rather than only those corresponding to the time-evolution under a
fixed local Hamiltonian for a time specified by the parameter. This ansatz
supports the representation of a larger, and potentially more useful, set of
states than the original formulation, with potential long-term impact on a
broad array of application areas. For cases that call for mixing only within a
desired subspace, refocusing on unitaries rather than Hamiltonians enables more
efficiently implementable mixers than was possible in the original framework.
Such mixers are particularly useful for optimization problems with hard
constraints that must always be satisfied, defining a feasible subspace, and
soft constraints whose violation we wish to minimize. More efficient
implementation enables earlier experimental exploration of an alternating
operator approach to a wide variety of approximate optimization, exact
optimization, and sampling problems. Here, we introduce the Quantum Alternating
Operator Ansatz, lay out design criteria for mixing operators, detail mappings
for eight problems, and provide brief descriptions of mappings for diverse
problems.Comment: 51 pages, 2 figures. Revised to match journal pape
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