MiniZinc

As a not professional programmer, but mathematically inclined I can say I found modelling in MiniZinc crazily hard. I tried the Coursera class, put in the hours and failed. It took me back to some classes where everything I tried failed and the proper result felt so near what I was trying that it was hard to digest a better strategy the next time. It did give me a new feeling for complexity and model space reduction. Somewhere MiniZinc and other engines are super efficient, you just need to put the problem in the right form (and therein lies the catch).

Re: MiniZinc

#8

Post by froggychairs » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 7:44 PM UTC

Im sure this is useful but these languages (proof langs, constraints, etc) are always so difficult to parse or read

Adoption for these systems might be higher if they had a more readable syntax (and bonus if they could transpile down to source code you can tweak)

Also maybe I missed it on mobile, but I would love examples of the syntax and examples of application usage on the first page. Maybe this is useful to me! Who knows? That information should be easy to find

Re: MiniZinc

#9

Post by orbit7 » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 7:48 PM UTC

max_ wrote: post #4

What exactly is "constraint modeling" and what is it used for?

My GPT answer was: Imagine you have a big box of colorful building blocks, and you want to create something specific, like a house or a car. But you have some rules or constraints that you need to follow in order to complete your creation. Constraint modeling is like playing with those building blocks, but with rules. It helps you figure out how to build something while following certain restrictions. These restrictions could be things like the size or shape of the blocks you can use, how they can fit together, or even how many blocks you have to use. So, constraint modeling is like a game where you have to solve puzzles using your building blocks, but you have to follow certain rules to complete the puzzle. It helps you think logically and creatively to build something amazing!

Re: MiniZinc

#10

Post by jpnelson » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 7:57 PM UTC

I wrote a thesis on using constraint satisfaction with minizinc to solve the genome edit distance problem: https://github.com/jpnelson/genome-edit/blob/master/thesis.p...

My takeaway: modeling problems in minizinc correctly is exceptionally difficult for non-trivial problems. You can model it correctly, but you'll likely still need to add additional "constraints" that improve the performance of the solver to the degree where it's even remotely usable to solve real problems.

It's a really interesting tool, but one of the reasons we thought it might be useful for this problem is so that non-technical people could easily change the constraints and play with the costs for different operations. I don't think it's particularly good for that, at least in this problem domain.