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Backtracking
Backtracking is a class of algorithms for finding solutions to some computational problems, notably constraint satisfaction problems, that incrementally builds candidates to the solutions, and abandons a candidate ("backtracks") as soon as it determines that the candidate cannot possibly be completed to a valid solution. The classic textbook example of the use of backtracking is the eight queens puzzle, that asks for all arrangements of eight chess queens on a standard chessboard so that no queen attacks any other. In the common backtracking approach, the partial candidates are arrangements of ''k'' queens in the first ''k'' rows of the board, all in different rows and columns. Any partial solution that contains two mutually attacking queens can be abandoned. Backtracking can be applied only for problems which admit the concept of a "partial candidate solution" and a relatively quick test of whether it can possibly be completed to a valid solution. It is useless, for example ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Algorithmics Of Sudoku
A standard Sudoku contains 81 cells, in a 9×9 grid, and has 9 boxes, each box being the intersection of the first, middle, or last 3 rows, and the first, middle, or last 3 columns. Each cell may contain a number from one to nine, and each number can only occur once in each row, column, and box. A Sudoku starts with some cells containing numbers (''clues''), and the goal is to solve the remaining cells. Proper Sudokus have one solution. Players and investigators use a wide range of computer algorithms to solve Sudokus, study their properties, and make new puzzles, including Sudokus with interesting symmetries and other properties. There are several computer algorithms that will solve 9×9 puzzles (=9) in fractions of a second, but combinatorial explosion occurs as increases, creating limits to the properties of Sudokus that can be constructed, analyzed, and solved as increases. Techniques Backtracking Some hobbyists have developed computer programs that will solve Sudoku p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Constraint Satisfaction Problem
Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) are mathematical questions defined as a set of objects whose state must satisfy a number of constraints or limitations. CSPs represent the entities in a problem as a homogeneous collection of finite constraints over variables, which is solved by constraint satisfaction methods. CSPs are the subject of research in both artificial intelligence and operations research, since the regularity in their formulation provides a common basis to analyze and solve problems of many seemingly unrelated families. CSPs often exhibit high complexity, requiring a combination of heuristics and combinatorial search methods to be solved in a reasonable time. Constraint programming (CP) is the field of research that specifically focuses on tackling these kinds of problems. Additionally, Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT), the satisfiability modulo theories (SMT), mixed integer programming (MIP) and answer set programming (ASP) are all fields of research focus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eight Queens Puzzle
The eight queens puzzle is the problem of placing eight chess queens on an 8×8 chessboard so that no two queens threaten each other; thus, a solution requires that no two queens share the same row, column, or diagonal. There are 92 solutions. The problem was first posed in the mid-19th century. In the modern era, it is often used as an example problem for various computer programming techniques. The eight queens puzzle is a special case of the more general ''n'' queens problem of placing ''n'' non-attacking queens on an ''n''×''n'' chessboard. Solutions exist for all natural numbers ''n'' with the exception of ''n'' = 2 and ''n'' = 3. Although the exact number of solutions is only known for ''n'' ≤ 27, the asymptotic growth rate of the number of solutions is (0.143 ''n'')''n''. History Chess composer Max Bezzel published the eight queens puzzle in 1848. Franz Nauck published the first solutions in 1850. W. W. Rouse Ball (1960) "The Eight Queens Problem", in ''Mathem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prolog
Prolog is a logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily as a declarative programming language: the program logic is expressed in terms of relations, represented as facts and rules. A computation is initiated by running a ''query'' over these relations. The language was developed and implemented in Marseille, France, in 1972 by Alain Colmerauer with Philippe Roussel, based on Robert Kowalski's procedural interpretation of Horn clauses at University of Edinburgh. Prolog was one of the first logic programming languages and remains the most popular such language today, with several free and commercial implementations available. The language has been used for theorem proving, expert systems, term rewriting, type systems, and automated planning, as well as its original intended field of use, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logic Programming
Logic programming is a programming paradigm which is largely based on formal logic. Any program written in a logic programming language is a set of sentences in logical form, expressing facts and rules about some problem domain. Major logic programming language families include Prolog, answer set programming (ASP) and Datalog. In all of these languages, rules are written in the form of ''clauses'': :H :- B1, …, Bn. and are read declaratively as logical implications: :H if B1 and … and Bn. H is called the ''head'' of the rule and B1, ..., Bn is called the ''body''. Facts are rules that have no body, and are written in the simplified form: :H. In the simplest case in which H, B1, ..., Bn are all atomic formulae, these clauses are called definite clauses or Horn clauses. However, there are many extensions of this simple case, the most important one being the case in which conditions in the body of a clause can also be negations of atomic formulas. Logic programming lan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Depth-first Search
Depth-first search (DFS) is an algorithm for traversing or searching tree or graph data structures. The algorithm starts at the root node (selecting some arbitrary node as the root node in the case of a graph) and explores as far as possible along each branch before backtracking. Extra memory, usually a stack, is needed to keep track of the nodes discovered so far along a specified branch which helps in backtracking of the graph. A version of depth-first search was investigated in the 19th century by French mathematician Charles Pierre Trémaux as a strategy for solving mazes. Properties The time and space analysis of DFS differs according to its application area. In theoretical computer science, DFS is typically used to traverse an entire graph, and takes time where , V, is the number of vertices and , E, the number of edges. This is linear in the size of the graph. In these applications it also uses space O(, V, ) in the worst case to store the stack of vertices on t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SNOBOL
SNOBOL ("StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language") is a series of programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4. It was one of a number of text-string-oriented languages developed during the 1950s and 1960s; others included COMIT and TRAC. SNOBOL4 stands apart from most programming languages of its era by having patterns as a first-class data type (''i.e.'' a data type whose values can be manipulated in all ways permitted to any other data type in the programming language) and by providing operators for pattern concatenation and alternation. SNOBOL4 patterns are a type of object and admit various manipulations, much like later object-oriented languages such as JavaScript whose patterns are known as regular expressions. In addition SNOBOL4 strings generated during execution can be treated as programs and either interpreted or compiled and executed (as in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verbal Arithmetic
Verbal arithmetic, also known as alphametics, cryptarithmetic, cryptarithm or word addition, is a type of mathematical game consisting of a mathematical equation among unknown numbers, whose digits are represented by letters of the alphabet. The goal is to identify the value of each letter. The name can be extended to puzzles that use non-alphabetic symbols instead of letters. The equation is typically a basic operation of arithmetic, such as addition, multiplication, or division. The classic example, published in the July 1924 issue of Strand Magazine by Henry Dudeney, is: \begin & & \text & \text & \text & \text \\ + & & \text & \text & \text & \text \\ \hline = & \text & \text & \text & \text & \text \\ \end The solution to this puzzle is O = 0, M = 1, Y = 2, E = 5, N = 6, D = 7, R = 8, and S = 9. Traditionally, each letter should represent a different digit, and (as an ordinary arithmetic notation) the leading digit of a multi-digit number must not be zer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Icon Programming Language
: Icon is a very high-level programming language based on the concept of "goal-directed execution" in which code returns a "success" along with valid values, or a "failure", indicating that there is no valid data to return. The success and failure of a given block of code is used to direct further processing, whereas conventional languages would typically use boolean logic written by the programmer to achieve the same ends. Because the logic for basic control structures is often implicit in Icon, common tasks can be completed with less explicit code. Icon was designed by Ralph Griswold after leaving Bell Labs where he was a major contributor to the SNOBOL language. SNOBOL was a string-processing language with what would be considered dated syntax by the standards of the early 1970s. After moving to the University of Arizona, he further developed the underlying SNOBOL concepts in SL5, but considered the result to be a failure. This led to the significantly updated Icon, which blend ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Line Search
In optimization, the line search strategy is one of two basic iterative approaches to find a local minimum \mathbf^* of an objective function f:\mathbb R^n\to\mathbb R. The other approach is trust region. The line search approach first finds a descent direction along which the objective function f will be reduced and then computes a step size that determines how far \mathbf should move along that direction. The descent direction can be computed by various methods, such as gradient descent or quasi-Newton method. The step size can be determined either exactly or inexactly. Example use Here is an example gradient method that uses a line search in step 4. # Set iteration counter \displaystyle k=0, and make an initial guess \mathbf_0 for the minimum # Repeat: # Compute a descent direction \mathbf_k # Choose \displaystyle \alpha_k to 'loosely' minimize h(\alpha_k)=f(\mathbf_k+\alpha_k\mathbf_k) over \alpha_k\in\mathbb R_+ # &n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sudoku Solved By Bactracking
Sudoku (; ja, 数独, sūdoku, digit-single; originally called Number Place) is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. In classic Sudoku, the objective is to fill a 9 × 9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3 × 3 subgrids that compose the grid (also called "boxes", "blocks", or "regions") contain all of the digits from 1 to 9. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid, which for a well-posed puzzle has a single solution. French newspapers featured variations of the Sudoku puzzles in the 19th century, and the puzzle has appeared since 1979 in puzzle books under the name Number Place. However, the modern Sudoku only began to gain widespread popularity in 1986 when it was published by the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli under the name Sudoku, meaning "single number". It first appeared in a U.S. newspaper, and then ''The Times'' (London), in 2004, thanks to the efforts of Wayne Gould, who devised a co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brute-force Search
In computer science, brute-force search or exhaustive search, also known as generate and test, is a very general problem-solving technique and algorithmic paradigm that consists of systematically enumerating all possible candidates for the solution and checking whether each candidate satisfies the problem's statement. A brute-force algorithm that finds the divisors of a natural number ''n'' would enumerate all integers from 1 to n, and check whether each of them divides ''n'' without remainder. A brute-force approach for the eight queens puzzle would examine all possible arrangements of 8 pieces on the 64-square chessboard and for each arrangement, check whether each (queen) piece can attack any other. While a brute-force search is simple to implement and will always find a solution if it exists, implementation costs are proportional to the number of candidate solutionswhich in many practical problems tends to grow very quickly as the size of the problem increases ( §Combinato ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
