hexiom

Minesweeper: https://yurichev.com/blog/minesweeper_SAT_SN Hexiom: https://github.com/hugomg/hexiom

One neat example that comes to my mind is how some package managers use SAT solvers to resolve package conversioning conflicts. I would say that SAT solvers (or SMT solvers, depending on the problem domain) are applicable to almost any kind of problem where the first thing that comes to your mind is implementing a brute-force search using backtracking. SAT solvers implement lots of tricks that are likely to leave naive backtracking algorithms in the dirt (knuth's chapter covers lots of them) One silly example I like is the time I used a SAT solver to find the solutions for a little Flash puzzle game. https://github.com/hugomg/hexiom My favorite part is how I could add some symmetry-breaking predicates to greatly speed up the solver on highly symmetrical problem instances. Those instances are very hard for hand-written algorithms and a SAT

SAT solvers and SMT solvers are greeat for the kind of problems where your first thought would be to use brute force or backtracking. They use some really clever implementation tricks and heuristics that are likely to beat any of your algorithms that you write from scratch. One of the more famous places where these constraint solvers are used is to deal with dependency management in package systems. For example, zeroinstall uses a SAT solver to resolve dependency conflicts. http://0install.net/solver.html A sillier example is the time I used a sat solver to find the solutions for a flash puzzle game. The part I'm proudest of is that the sat solver could handle the highly symmetric cases that stumped the hand-written backtracking algorithms. And if I had used an SMT solver instead of SAT I would not have had to convert everything all the w

Are you familiar on how you can use SAT solvers to solve a wide variety of constraint problems? https://github.com/hugomg/hexiom SMT solvers basically extend SAT solvers to allow you to work directly with other theories (linear inequalities, bit arrays, etc) without being forced to encode this as the booloean formulas that basic SAT understand. The idea is that dealing with the higher level details directly instead of having to convert tihngs to a commo low level makes it simpler to express things and can also allow for custumized optimizations and algorithms?