Software

Software

Mistral

Mistral is a constraint satisfaction and optimisation solver written in C++.
- It won in three categories during the 2009 International CSP Solver Competition
- It did well during the 2008 International CSP Solver Competition.
- It did okay during the 2006 International CSP Solver Competition.
- It was appalling during the first round of the 2006’s competition (sorry, the results are not even available).
The only possible conclusion is that nowadays constraint solvers are not as good as they used to be.

Important disclaimer: Mistral is supported only by yours truly, is loosely documented and pretty buggy. I welcome bug reports, but will only answer them if I feel like it. Mistral is therefore suitable only to C++ programmers who are not afraid of coding and debugging, or very optimistic and laid back users. If you fall in either category, you can download the latest version or view the hmmdocumentation online.

Here’s a model of the Golomb ruler problem written in Mistral:

Numberjack (cuts your exponential search tree into logs!)

Numberjack is a python constraint programming module written by Eoin O’Mahony. It can be used as a front end for Mistral, for quick and easy prototyping.