[gecode-users] Gecode 3.0.0: What we will do. What do you want?
Malcolm Ryan
malcolmr at cse.unsw.edu.au
Thu Jun 26 10:24:31 CEST 2008
On 26/06/2008, at 2:07 AM, Christian Schulte wrote:
> Now: What do you want? How can you help us? Are we missing something
> really
> important? Is there something fundamentally wrong?
Firstly, let me thank you for a fabulous tool and better support than
any free software I've encountered before. Research software is not
usually any near the quality of Gecode and you deserve high acclaim
for your work.
As for improvements, in the short term I think the push to fill out
the documentation is important. In the longer term, it would be good
to see more visualisation and debugging tools. If you make an error in
your constraint definitions, at the moment it is very difficult to
detect and isolate the problem. It is also hard to visualise whether
your constraint system is propagating and searching efficiently. It
would be very nice to have a graphical way to watch the propagation of
information around the constraint graph.
Like any programming language, there are good and bad ways of writing
constraint systems. At the moment the modelling problem remains a
black art, only really properly understood by a few. I think it will
remain that way as long as constraint propagation remains a black box.
Solving this may require a significant about of HCI work, but I think
it would be very valuable in the long run.
Malcolm
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