Really hating the trend of putting half of the document behind series of “click here to unhide the content” dropdowns.
Planner programming blows my mind
31–40 of 75 posts
Re: Planner programming blows my mind
#32I've actually used Picat's planning mode at work! I prototyped a system to orchestrate maintenance on fleets of devices. The idea was that, rather than telling the system how to do it (e.g. workflows to roll out an update), you'd tell the system what you wanted (e.g. up to date machines), what actions were available (e.g. pull a machine from rotation, apply an update), and what constraints to obey (e.g. X of Y machin…
There are plenty of commercial solvers out there that beat the pants off the open source options in terms of performance and in terms of depleting one's wallet :) CPLEX, Xpress, GUROBI, and Hexaly all come to mind. Hexaly is really good for scheduling problems and things like vehicle routing. You typically access these via an API they offer you for the popular industry languages. This approach seems to make a lot mor…
If any of these had reasonable pricing I’d be happy to pay, but if the first price you see is ‘contact us’ you can be certain it’s too much for hobby use…
Re: Planner programming blows my mind
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of commercial solvers out there that beat the pants off the open source options in terms of performance and in terms of depleting one's wallet :) CPLEX, Xpress, GUROBI, and Hexaly all come to mind. Hexaly is really good for scheduling problems and things like vehicle routing. You typically access these via an API they offer you for the popular industry languages. This approach seems to make a lot mor…
Are the commercial offerings you mentioned better than TimeFold? [0] (formerly known as OptaPlanner before the main developers forked it) TimeFold's heuristics-based approach makes fast solutions to even highly-complex scenarios within the reach of anyone who can write Java or Python expressions that evaluate to true when constraints are satisfied. [0] https://timefold.ai/
I found Optaplanner to be nice, but supremely unergonomic to use. I could replicate their example problems and not much else.
> All OptaPlanner features are part of Community Edition, except for Multithreaded Solving
Of course, because why not. If you can take features away from an existing thing to make more money.
Re: Planner programming blows my mind
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of commercial solvers out there that beat the pants off the open source options in terms of performance and in terms of depleting one's wallet :) CPLEX, Xpress, GUROBI, and Hexaly all come to mind. Hexaly is really good for scheduling problems and things like vehicle routing. You typically access these via an API they offer you for the popular industry languages. This approach seems to make a lot mor…
Are the commercial offerings you mentioned better than TimeFold? [0] (formerly known as OptaPlanner before the main developers forked it) TimeFold's heuristics-based approach makes fast solutions to even highly-complex scenarios within the reach of anyone who can write Java or Python expressions that evaluate to true when constraints are satisfied. [0] https://timefold.ai/
Huh, didn't know Optaplanner was forked. Bit sad, you would have thought it was good fit for IBM to all the enterprisey business automation stuff. Does Optaplanner have anyone left working on IBM(/RH) side?
Anyways, I wish the best for Timefold team, hopefully they can find success independently. With all the money sloshing around for all sorts of dumb AI projects, I think Timefold definitely deserves a portion too.
Re: Planner programming blows my mind
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of commercial solvers out there that beat the pants off the open source options in terms of performance and in terms of depleting one's wallet :) CPLEX, Xpress, GUROBI, and Hexaly all come to mind. Hexaly is really good for scheduling problems and things like vehicle routing. You typically access these via an API they offer you for the popular industry languages. This approach seems to make a lot mor…
Are the commercial offerings you mentioned better than TimeFold? [0] (formerly known as OptaPlanner before the main developers forked it) TimeFold's heuristics-based approach makes fast solutions to even highly-complex scenarios within the reach of anyone who can write Java or Python expressions that evaluate to true when constraints are satisfied. [0] https://timefold.ai/
I just hate it when you go to the pricing page and theres NO PRICING. None.
Re: Planner programming blows my mind
#36I've actually used Picat's planning mode at work! I prototyped a system to orchestrate maintenance on fleets of devices. The idea was that, rather than telling the system how to do it (e.g. workflows to roll out an update), you'd tell the system what you wanted (e.g. up to date machines), what actions were available (e.g. pull a machine from rotation, apply an update), and what constraints to obey (e.g. X of Y machin…
Why don't high quality open-source solvers exist? The SOTA in other numerical computing is often open-source. I've always wondered why optimization was different.
Re: Planner programming blows my mind
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of commercial solvers out there that beat the pants off the open source options in terms of performance and in terms of depleting one's wallet :) CPLEX, Xpress, GUROBI, and Hexaly all come to mind. Hexaly is really good for scheduling problems and things like vehicle routing. You typically access these via an API they offer you for the popular industry languages. This approach seems to make a lot mor…
Gurobi is a MIP solver right, not a planner? I use Gurobi at work for a certain kind of bi-level programming and it's amazing, like literally ~500x faster than CBC. Picat's planner is more like a Prolog flavor of PDDL (e.g. fast-downward and its ilk.)
Did you tried highs it is way faster than CBC and open source.
Re: Planner programming blows my mind
#38I'd -- as usual -- suggest Prolog. Its elegant, easier to understand and more mature. It comes with "batteries included" if you want constraint solving over finite domains.
Besides that MiniZinc is a phenomenal interface to a whole range of solvers specialised to various purposes which are more likely to get you where you want to go if you're not an expert. In the Prolog case -- for all its benefits -- the amount of "mechanical sympathy" required to make it perform well can become substantial very quickly.
Finally, once you've written something in Picat, have a think about how you'd write it in some other language. I think you'll find .. for these toy problems, its easy in other languages too. After all, its a handful of lines to write Dijkstra or A* in most functional programming languages, and defining a state space for a search algorithm is essentially all you're ever doing.
Re: Planner programming blows my mind
#39I'm a little confused about how planning is different from vector reachability, which, from what I understand, has Ackermann complexity rather than EXPTIME. Can anyone help me out with the constraints on "planning" that allow it to be solved in a sane amount of time? https://www.quantamagazine.org/an-easy-sounding-problem-yiel...
I think in classic planning like STRIPS, the size of the state space is bounded exponentially in the size of the input (conditions can be either true or false).
This is not the case of vector reachability.
I'm not familiar with picat, but the arithmetic operations used in the blog post suggest to me that the size of the state space is not necessarily bounded by the input. I believe the mention of EXPTIME in the post was removed.
Re: Planner programming blows my mind
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of commercial solvers out there that beat the pants off the open source options in terms of performance and in terms of depleting one's wallet :) CPLEX, Xpress, GUROBI, and Hexaly all come to mind. Hexaly is really good for scheduling problems and things like vehicle routing. You typically access these via an API they offer you for the popular industry languages. This approach seems to make a lot mor…
If any of these had reasonable pricing I’d be happy to pay, but if the first price you see is ‘contact us’ you can be certain it’s too much for hobby use…
It’s worth asking for free access. Make it clear that you are an individual (not a commercial users) looking to learn and that you wouldn’t be a burden on their network or support system.