CP2013: Ian Gent blogs about the Lightning Model and Solve Competition
Ian Gent, a member of the winning team (Mano) in the First International Lightning Model and Solve Competition this conference, has just published a blog post about how and why he and his team won: How I became one of the three "best optimizers in the world".
Ian writes very interesting details about how the team approached the problems, why they decided to solve all problems by hand, etc. I like Ian's conclusions:
Also, see my summary of the competition: CP-2013: The Conference Day 3 (Thursday) and CP-2013: Competition problems, rules, and instances.
Ian writes very interesting details about how the team approached the problems, why they decided to solve all problems by hand, etc. I like Ian's conclusions:
What Have We Learnt For Constraint Programming?As one of the organizers of the competition, I also thank Ian for this comments about what we can do better the next time. [This means that I have read it, but will not promise anything. :-)]
One word. Modelling.
To expand, Modelling is hard.
To expand, we need better tools to make it easier to model constraint problems quickly. Every group should have been able to use a simple constraints tool to model the easier problems (like queens) and then get on with the other ones.
This is what I take away, and it's nice that this is research that we in St Andrews are already doing, so I hope we can push this harder after this experience.
Also, see my summary of the competition: CP-2013: The Conference Day 3 (Thursday) and CP-2013: Competition problems, rules, and instances.