MiniZinc Challenge 2011 announced
Today the MiniZinc Challenge 2011 (the fourth) was announced:
If you haven't, now can be a good time to read the paper Philosophy of the MiniZinc Challenge by Peter J. Stuckey, Ralph Becket, Julien Fischer (from 2010) that discuss the MiniZinc Challenge is more detail.
The aim of the challenge is to start to compare various constraint solving technology on the same problems sets. The focus is on finite domain propagation solvers. An auxiliary aim is to build up a library of interesting problem models, which can be used to compare solvers and solving technologies.See the MiniZinc Challenge 2011 -- Rules for more details. Note, for example, that the scoring procedure has been changed from previous competitions.
Entrants to the challenge provide a FlatZinc solver and global constraint definitions specialized for their solver. Each solver is run on 100 MiniZinc model instances. We run the translator mzn2fzn on the MiniZinc model and instance using the provided global constraint definitions to create a FlatZinc file. The FlatZinc file is input to the provided solver. Points are awarded for solving problems, speed of solution, and goodness of solutions (for optimization problems).
If you haven't, now can be a good time to read the paper Philosophy of the MiniZinc Challenge by Peter J. Stuckey, Ralph Becket, Julien Fischer (from 2010) that discuss the MiniZinc Challenge is more detail.