MiniZinc Language
A MiniZinc Language is a formal language to specific CP Tasks.
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- Counter-Example(s):
- See: MiniZinc Challenge, Modeling Language.
References
2014
- http://www.minizinc.org/
- QUOTE: MiniZinc is a medium-level constraint modelling language. It is high-level enough to express most constraint problems easily, but low-level enough that it can be mapped onto existing solvers easily and consistently. It is a subset of the higher-level language Zinc. We hope it will be adopted as a standard by the Constraint Programming community.
FlatZinc is a low-level solver input language that is the target language for MiniZinc. It is designed to be easy to translate into the form required by a solver.
- QUOTE: MiniZinc is a medium-level constraint modelling language. It is high-level enough to express most constraint problems easily, but low-level enough that it can be mapped onto existing solvers easily and consistently. It is a subset of the higher-level language Zinc. We hope it will be adopted as a standard by the Constraint Programming community.
- http://www.minizinc.org/downloads/doc-latest/minizinc-tute.pdf
- QUOTE: MiniZinc is a language designed for specifying constrained optimization and decision problems over integers and real numbers. A MiniZinc model does not dictate how to solve the problem although the model can contain annotations which are used to guide the underlying solver.
MiniZinc is designed to interface easily to different backend solvers. It does this by transforming an input MiniZinc model and data file into a FlatZinc model. FlatZinc models consist of variable declaration and constraint definitions as well as a definition of the objective function if the problem is an optimization problem. The translation from MiniZinc to FlatZinc is specializable to individual backend solvers, so they can control what form constraints end up in. In particular, MiniZinc allows the specification of global constraints by decomposition.
- QUOTE: MiniZinc is a language designed for specifying constrained optimization and decision problems over integers and real numbers. A MiniZinc model does not dictate how to solve the problem although the model can contain annotations which are used to guide the underlying solver.
2010
- (Stuckey et al., 2010) ⇒ Peter J Stuckey, Ralph Becket, and Julien Fischer. (2010). “Philosophy of the MiniZinc Challenge.” In: Constraints, 15(3). doi:10.1007/s10601-010-9093-0
- QUOTE: MiniZinc arose as a response to the extended discussion at CP2006 of the need for a standard modelling language for CP. This is a challenging problem, and we believe MiniZinc makes a good attempt to handle the most obvious obstacle: there are hundreds of potential global constraints, most handled by few or no systems. A standard input language for solvers gives us the capability to compare different solvers. Hence, every year since 2008 we have run the MiniZinc Challenge comparing different solvers that support MiniZinc. In this report we discuss the philosophy behind the challenge, why we do it, how we do it, and why we do it that way.