Constraint Programming and Hybrid Formulations for Three Life Designs

Abstract

Conway's game of Life provides an interesting testbed for exploring issues in formulation, symmetry, and optimization with constraint programming and hybrid constraint programming/integer programming methods. We consider three Life pattern-creation problems: finding maximum density still-Lifes, finding smallest immediate predecessor patterns, and finding period-2 oscillators. For the first two problems, integrating integer programming and constraint programming approaches provides a much better solution procedure than either individually. For the final problem, the constraint programming formulation provides the better approach.

Publisher

Springer Verlag

Publication Date

8-1-2004

Publication Title

Annals of Operations Research

Department

Mathematics

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.1023/B:ANOR.0000032569.86938.2f

Keywords

Theory of computation, Combinatorics, Operation Research/Decision Theory

Language

English

Format

text

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