Hacker News Reader

I use Minizinc in a personal toy project (https://gitlab.com/dustin-space/meal-scheduler), and GECODE or Google's ortools solver at the backend. It's used for meal planning. Unfortunately it's way way slower than I'd hope. I suspect I just have the domain not modeled efficiently. Maybe if I had a few days to put into it, and learn how to properly debug the CSP solver step by step, it might help...

View on HN

Fun problem. When solving with Gecode, you might want to add the annotation `:: domain_propagation` to the `all_different` constraint (https://www.minizinc.org/doc-2.6.2/en/lib-stdlib-annotations...). Sometimes a good idea, sometimes not.

If you can extract some instances you could send in your problem to the MiniZinc challenge (https://www.minizinc.org/challenge2022/challenge.html), preferably with several instances with varying complexity. The benefit for you is that it is a good way to ensure that your particular problem is tested for a lot of solvers, and may be used for improvments of solvers in the future. The deadline for this years challenge problem submission is 6th of May.

Thanks for the tips!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com