Solve a Constraint Problem without Modeling It

Abstract

We study how to find a solution to a constraint problem without modeling it. Constraint acquisition systems such as Conacq or ModelSeeker are not able to solve a single instance of a problem because they require positive examples to learn. The recent QuAcq algorithm for constraint acquisition does not require positive examples to learn a constraint network. It is thus able to solve a constraint problem without modeling it: we simply exit from QuAcq as soon as a complete example is classified as positive by the user. In this paper, we propose ASK&SOLVE, an elicitation-based solver that tries to find the best trade off between learning and solving to converge as soon as possible on a solution. We propose several strategies to speed-up ASK&SOLVE. Finally we give an experimental evaluation that shows that our approach improves the state of the art.