The impact of balancing on problem hardness in a highly structured domain

Thumbnail
View/Open
Issue date
2006
Author
Ansótegui Gil, Carlos José
Béjar Torres, Ramón
Fernàndez Camon, César
Gomes, Carla
Mateu Piñol, Carles
Suggested citation
Ansótegui Gil, Carlos José; Béjar Torres, Ramón; Fernàndez Camon, César; Gomes, Carla; Mateu Piñol, Carles; . (2006) . The impact of balancing on problem hardness in a highly structured domain. Proceedings of the twenty-first National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2006, p. 10-15. http://hdl.handle.net/10459.1/46638.
Impact

Google Scholar logo  Google Scholar
Share
Export to Mendeley
Metadata
Show full item record
Abstract
Random problem distributions have played a key role in the study and design of algorithms for constraint satisfaction and Boolean satisfiability, as well as in ourunderstanding of problem hardness, beyond standard worst-case complexity. We consider random problem distributions from a highly structured problem domain that generalizes the Quasigroup Completion problem (QCP) and Quasigroup with Holes (QWH), a widely used domain that captures the structure underlying a range of real-world applications. Our problem domain is also a generalization of the well-known Sudoku puz- zle: we consider Sudoku instances of arbitrary order, with the additional generalization that the block regions can have rectangular shape, in addition to the standard square shape. We evaluate the computational hardness of Generalized Sudoku instances, for different parameter settings. Our experimental hardness results show that we can generate instances that are considerably harder than QCP/QWH instances of the same size. More interestingly, we show the impact of different balancing strategies on problem hardness. We also provide insights into backbone variables in Generalized Sudoku instances and how they correlate to problem hardness.
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10459.1/46638
Is part of
Proceedings of the twenty-first National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2006, p. 10-15
Collections