Alan K. Mackworth's Publications

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The Logic of Constraint Satisfaction

Alan K. Mackworth. The Logic of Constraint Satisfaction. Artificial Intelligence, 58:3–20, 1992.

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Abstract

The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) formalization has been a productive tool within Artificial Intelligence and related areas. The finite CSP (FCSP) framework is presented here as a restricted logical calculus within a space of logical representation and reasoning systems. FCSP is formulated in a variety of logical settings: theorem proving in first order predicate calculus, propositional theorem proving (and hence SAT), the Prolog and Datalog approaches, constraint network algorithms, a logical interpreter for networks of constraints, the constraint logic programming (CLP) paradigm and propositional model finding (and hence SAT, again). Several standard, and some not-so-standard, logical methods can therefore be used to solve these problems. By doing this we obtain a specification of the semantics of the common approaches. This synthetic treatment also allows algorithms and results from these disparate areas to be imported, and specialized, to FCSP; the special properties of FCSP are exploited to achieve, for example, completeness and to improve efficiency. It also allows export to the related areas. By casting CSP both as a generalization of FCSP and as a specialization of CLP it is observed that some, but not all, FCSP techniques lift to CSP and thereby to CLP. Various new connections are uncovered, in particular between the proof-finding approaches and the alternative model-finding approaches that have arisen in depiction and diagnosis applications.

BibTeX

@Article{AI92,
  author =	 {Alan K. Mackworth},
  title =	 {The Logic of Constraint Satisfaction},
  year =	 {1992},
  journal =	 {Artificial Intelligence},
  volume =       {58},
  pages =         {3--20},
  abstract =	 {The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) formalization has been a productive tool within Artificial Intelligence and related areas. The finite CSP (FCSP) framework is presented here as a restricted logical calculus within a space of logical representation and reasoning systems. FCSP is formulated in a variety of logical settings: theorem proving in first order predicate calculus, propositional theorem proving (and hence SAT), the Prolog and Datalog approaches, constraint network algorithms, a logical interpreter for networks of constraints, the constraint logic programming (CLP) paradigm and propositional model finding (and hence SAT, again). Several standard, and some not-so-standard, logical methods can therefore be used to solve these problems. By doing this we obtain a specification of the semantics of the common approaches. This synthetic treatment also allows algorithms and results from these disparate areas to be imported, and specialized, to FCSP; the special properties of FCSP are exploited to achieve, for example, completeness and to improve efficiency. It also allows export to the related areas. By casting CSP both as a generalization of FCSP and as a specialization of CLP it is observed that some, but not all, FCSP techniques lift to CSP and thereby to CLP. Various new connections are uncovered, in particular between the proof-finding approaches and the alternative model-finding approaches that have arisen in depiction and diagnosis applications.},
  bib2html_pubtype ={Refereed Journal},
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}

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