Procedural Attachments in Search

In many search problems there are subproblems that can be solved in polynomial time using special-purpose knowledge or methods. Procedural attachment in reasoning allows these methods to be used directly when searching, thus splitting the problem into polynomial parts performed by the procedures, and a pure search part done by the search engine(s).

CIRL

An important part of the CSP research at CIRL concerns this separation of polynomial subproblems from the harder parts. This is evident in our approach to scheduling problems, and in the work on formalizing this separation. The formalization is based on the idea that procedures can be viewed as functions from the set of partial assignments to itself. This allows the procedures to be defined and implemented independently of the search method being used. Furthermore theoretical properties of solvers and procedures can be proved.

Pointers

Procedural Reasoning in Constraint Satisfaction
This article introduces a simple, but powerful formalism for using procedural calculations in search engines. Useful properties such as completeness and systematicity are proven to hold for a large class of search engines and procedures. Written by Ari Jonsson and Matt Ginsberg and appeared in Proc. KR in 1996. Postscript document.

Parent areas:
Systematic Search

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