Bücher von Thom Fruhwirth

The ConstraintHandling Rules (CHR) languagecameto life morethan 15 years ago.Sincethen,ithasbecomeamajordeclarativespeci?cationandimplemen- tion language for constraint-based algorithms and applications. In recent years, the ?ve Workshops on Constraint Handling Rules have spurred the exchange of ideas within the CHR community, which has led to increased international collaboration, new theoretical results and optimized implementations. The aim of this volume of Lecture Notes in Ariti?cial Intelligence was to attract high-quality research papers on these recent advances in CHR. The 8 papersinthis issuewereselectedfrom11submissionsaftercarefulreviewingand subsequent revisions. Each paper was reviewd by three reviewers. The accepted papers represent some of the research teams on CHR around the world. It is not by accident that the currently most active research group is featured here with three articles. We also would have liked to see contributions from other CHR teams, but space is limited and the reviewers took their job seriously. After an introductory article that foreshadows an upcoming monograph on CHR, the accepted papers span a range of current research topics in the CHR community. It goes from extending the CHR language with search facilities and the related adaptive framework, and from generating rules from speci?cations of constraint solvers to implementing abductive probabilistic reasoning. They cover the theory that is a compositional semantics for CHR and ?nally describe e?cient implementations of CHR in traditional mainstream programming l- guages and compiler optimizations in the context of the re?ned semantics of CHR. Wewouldliketothanktheauthorsofsubmittedpapersandthemanyrevi- ers for their contribution in making this collection of research papers possible.

Programming with constraints makes it possible to model and specify problems with uncertain, incomplete information and to solve combi natorial problems, as they are abundant in industry and commerce, such as scheduling, planning, transportation, resource allocation, layout, design, and analysis.

Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is both a theoretical formalism based on logic and a practical programming language based on rules. This book, written by the creator of CHR, describes the theory of CHR and how to use it in practice. It is supported by a website containing teaching materials, online demos, and free downloads of the language. After a basic tutorial, the author describes in detail the CHR language and discusses guaranteed properties of CHR programs. The author then compares CHR with other formalisms and languages and illustrates how it can capture their essential features. Finally, larger programs are introduced and analyzed in detail. The book is ideal for graduate students and lecturers, and for more experienced programmers and researchers, who can use it for self-study. Exercises with selected solutions, and bibliographic remarks are included at the ends of chapters. The book is the definitive reference on the subject.

Mason's marks (Steinmetzzeichen) are symbols carved by stonecutters on dressed stone. These signs go back about 4500 years. In Europe, one can mainly find quarrier's marks from the medieval ages. In Architectural History, stonemason's marks allow to reconstruct the construction process of a building. Mason's marks can be concisely represented by planar line graphs using basic Computational Geometry.This text shortly introduces mason's marks and the implementation of the software tool VanDeGraphGenerator to draw, analyse, and generate graphs in the declarative programming language Constraint Handling Rules. This book then features sixty choice mason's marks from Ulm Minster, Strasbourg Cathedral, and Iglesia Arciprestal de Santiago in Spain.Exploiting the inherent structural regularities of mason's marks, VanDeGraphGenerator can assemble new designs automatically using methods from Artificial Intelligence research to achieve a kind of Computational Creativity. The main part of the book showcases more than thousand new designs produced by the tool.