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Principles of Constraint Programming (Apt, 2003)

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Review
'... a fundamental new way of looking at constraint programming ... This book ... is a great present to the constraint programming community, which will certainly advance scientifically because of its publication. We need good books to educate new people to Constraint Programming in the best way, and this book is a great way to do this.' Theory and Practice of Logic Programming '... a fundamental new way of looking at constraint programming ... done with the highest level of precision and formality, without however making the reading task too heavy, as it is typical of Apt's writing style ... I really enjoyed reading Apt's book and am using it for my current course on constraint programming ... it is extremely well written ... the formal style never makes reading a heavy task ... it provides a very original abstract view of the main concepts of constraint propagation and constraint programming, which can be very useful both for beginners who need to understand[ing] these concepts without getting lost, and also for experienced researchers ... I have always been stunned by his exceptional ability to be formal and clear. This book is yet another witness for this ability - Journal of TLP

p.4 constraint programming proved itself a viable approach to tackle certain computationally intractable problems.
 
p.343 In case of search algorithms for constrained optimization problems the following heuristics is helpful:
  • select a value for which the heuristic function yields the highest outcome.
If the heuristic function is well chosen (that is, approximates reasonably well the obj function), such a value is then "most promising".
 
p.357 modeling is more an art than a science... Probably, for each rule of thumb one can find an exception.

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