Abstract:
This talk will review the principles and the historical roots of constraint programming (CP). Indeed, understanding the history behind this field helps understand the basic principles it is built on. CP can be traced back to a combination of Artificial Intelligence, Combinatorics (graph algorithms), and programming language design. It took two decades to unify these in a comprehensive and versatile framework shared by all modern CP tools and solvers. We'll review this framework and how it is implemented in recent tools. Last we will relate it and contrast it with mathematical programming.