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From: Peter N. <pw...@st...> - 2013-09-30 17:00:49
|
<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> Hi,<br> <br> We are happy to announce the release of Minion 1.6, available at:<br> <br> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://minion.sourceforge.net/">http://minion.sourceforge.net/</a><br> <br> This release includes some of our recent research on short supports, as well as implementations of the MDD and negative MDD constraints. Minion is now stable and mature so we have chosen to multiply the release number by 10. So 1.6 follows 0.15.<br> <br> As usual, we (me and Christopher Jefferson) are happy to receive emails about new uses of Minion, and bug reports, to <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:pw...@st...">pw...@st...</a> or <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:ca...@st...">ca...@st...</a>. Alternatively, join the Minion User Group list here:<br> <br> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://mailman.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/mug">https://mailman.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/mug</a><br> <br> Best regards,<br> Peter<br> <br> <u>Release notes</u><br> <br> <strong>September 30, 2013.</strong> Minion 1.6 has been released. We have had no "wrong answer" bugs in over a year, and Minion has been stable for a number of years. Therefore we decided to leap-frog 1.0 and go directly to 1.6 (instead of 0.16). <p> Changelog: </p> <ul> <li>Bugfixes: <ul> <li>Fix an occasional crash when minion exits (this only happened after all output was produced.)</li> </ul> </li> <li>Improvements: <ul> <li>Added an implementation of the shortstr2 propagator (as published in IJCAI 2013), and SHORTTUPLES, which is a compressed form of tuples used by ShortSTR2 and some other propagators.</li> <li>Added the command line option '-map-long-short' to automatically compress standard tuples into short tuples, for use with shortstr2 and haggisgac (also published in IJCAI 2013)</li> <li>Added an implementation of the mddc, negativemddc and str2plus propagators.</li> <li>All constraints now work with negative values, in particular pow, div and mod.</li> <li>Minion can now support 64-bit domains on both 32-bit and 64-bit processors. Enable with the DOMAINS64 compile time option to CMake.</li> </ul> </li> <li>Other changes: <ul> <li>Many old pieces of code were cleaned up or deleted.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> <br> </body> </html> |
From: Peter N. <pw...@st...> - 2012-07-27 10:38:00
|
We are pleased to announce that Minion 0.14 has just been released. Binaries for several platforms and the source can be downloaded from http://minion.sourceforge.net/ Changelog: Bugfixes: -- When Minion was asked to find all solutions to a problem that could be solved without search, it returned the one solution then segfaulted. This was corrected, it does not change the set of solutions but does now exit correctly. Improvements: -- Minion is now able to split the remaining search to allow parallel search. See the manual for further details. This introduces the -split command-line switch. Other changes: -- The -resume-file commandline switch has been removed because its function is no longer necessary as resume files are now self-contained. See the manual. Pete |
From: Lars K. <la...@cs...> - 2012-05-01 12:34:16
|
We are pleased to announce that Minion 0.13 has just been released to sourceforge. Binaries for several platforms and the source can be downloaded at http://minion.sourceforge.net Changelog: - Bugfixes: - Two 'incorrect answer' bugs were fixed, involving Booleans. These are both cases of invalid input being accidentally accepted. - According to the manual reify(C,b) would only accept a BOOLEAN variable, but the code would accept other variables, and then produce a wrong answer. The code now works correctly. - The '!' operator would accept non-boolean variables, and then produce incorrect results. The input is now rejected. - SAC did not propagate as much as it should. This never produced incorrect answers, only a slightly larger search in some cases. - Minion could produce incorrect answers when too large inputs were given (around 2^31). Now sensible error message are produced. - Previously when using a 'MINIMISING' condition, Minion would print out the negative of the optimal value found. - Improvements: - Previously variables left out of the variable ordering were not branched on. While this was expected behaviour, it could lead to Minion printing out invalid values if these variables were not assigned by propagation. Now Minion always branches on all variables. - Add flag '-printonlyoptimal' which prints only the optimal solution for optimisation problems, not the intermediate solutions. - All constraints can now be reified. - Big speed improvements to some cases of element - -varorder=random now uses a dynamic random order, rather than a static one. - Make memory allocation lazy. This is more efficent when we don't need much of it. - Produce better error messages for invalid input. Lars |
From: Lars K. <la...@cs...> - 2011-03-21 12:43:35
|
We are pleased to announce that Minion 0.12 has just been released to sourceforge. Binaries for several platforms and the source can be downloaded at http://minion.sourceforge.net Changelog: - Bugfixes: - fix visualiser to work with more recent versions of Haskell - fix memory reporting on Mac OS X - fix some numerical issues with CPU time reporting - Misc improvements: - more robust and more thorough testing Lars |
From: Lars K. <la...@cs...> - 2011-02-12 14:07:52
|
We are pleased to announce that Minion 0.11 has just been released to sourceforge. Binaries for several platforms and the source can be downloaded at http://minion.sourceforge.net Please note that we are unable to provide debug binaries for Mac OS X because of the GCC version included with XCode. Changelog: - New features: - added negation of diseq constraint - added negation of watched-and constraint - enable watched-or to work with bound variables - Bugfixes: - bug fixes with nested watched-and and watched-or - bug fixes in the tester - Misc improvements: - improvements in documentation - integrate new implementations of gcc and gccweak with many more compile-time options - added visualisation scripts - added literal tightness statistics to -instancestats - Minion might work on OpenSolaris now Never Trust a Monster to do the Work of an Evil Scientist. Lars |
From: Lars K. <la...@cs...> - 2010-03-17 11:19:58
|
We are pleased to announce that Minion 0.10 has just been released to sourceforge. Binaries for several platforms and the source can be downloaded at http://minion.sourceforge.net Changelog: Nauty is now included by default for automatic symmetry detection. New features: added watchvecexists_less constraint added quick lexless constraint added lightweight table constraint new flag -instancestats that will give various properties about the instance new flag -searchlimit to limit only time spent in search and not in preprocessing Bugfixes: time limits are now taken into account during preprocessing as well some of the generators were getting old and have been updated reification of unary constraints works properly now set constraints on empty sets now work several bugfixes for watched constraints Misc improvements: speed improvements and memory for the parser reduced memory requirements improved testing tidier reimplementation of the search manager bumped minimum Mac OSX version from 10.4 to 10.5 Lars |
From: Lars K. <la...@cs...> - 2009-08-21 13:58:32
|
Minion version 0.9 has now been released at sourceforge. Cygwin, Windows, Linux and Mac binaries and the source can be downloaded from http://minion.sourceforge.net. Changelog: New features: - added ability to abort and resume runs - added lex[rv] (which achieves GAC with repeated variables) and lex[quick] constraints - added -cpulimit flag to limit CPU rather than wall time Misc improvements: - various source code cleanups - converted the benchmarks to Minion 3 format - speedup for input file parsing - added support for Windows without Cygwin - reduced memory usage |
From: Lars K. <la...@cs...> - 2009-04-06 09:45:39
|
Minion version 0.8.1 has now been released at sourceforge. Cygwin, Linux and Mac binaries and the source can be downloaded from http://minion.sourceforge.net . Changelog: Improvements: - the code was cleaned up and modularised to be more easily understandable and modifiable - more information is made available in INFO mode - some minor bugfixes Performance enhancements: - bound checks for Boolean variables are more efficient - input files are parsed faster Other changes: - the build system now provides make targets to run the tests - builds are not done in the main direcotry anymore, but in a separate directory (meaning that you can have as many different builds of the same source as you like) - better Cygwin support The Minion Development Team. |
From: Lars K. <la...@cs...> - 2009-02-18 18:47:11
|
Minion version 0.8.0 has now been released at sourceforge. Cygwin, Linux and Mac binaries and the source can be downloaded from http://minion.sourceforge.net . Users who use pre-compiled binaries should find any existing problem files run the same as before. Building from source has changed substantially, with Minion now requiring both the 'cmake' build system and 'boost' C++ library. Full instructions are included in the source package. The following bugs, which could have produced incorrect answers, have been fixed: * The 'pow' constraint was confused by domains which contained '0'. * Using integers close to 2^32 could occasionally produce incorrect results. * The table constraint containing 1 tuple over no variables was considered false, not true. The following bugs, which could not produce incorrect errors, have been fixed: * Arrays containing no variables crashed Minion. * Many constraints crashed when given arrays of length 0. * Table constraints caused crashes when the length of tuples is not equal to the number of variables. The following improvements have been made to Minion, some of which have been in previous versions but are now correctly documented: * All constraints can now be reified. * An efficient method of calculating the 'or' of a list of constraints has been added. * Efficient implementations of alldiff and gcc (global cardinality constraint) have been added. * A number of other binary and unary constraints have been added. * There is now a rudimentary visualiser which shows (in a matrix) the domains/assignments of variables during search. * The Minion build system now uses 'cmake'. * The documentation has been improved. A large number of other small improvements and adjustments have been made as well, based on a much larger automated test suite. Note that Tailor is not part of the standard Minion distribution anymore; it is released separately. The Minion Development Team. |
From: Chris J. <ch...@bu...> - 2008-06-18 21:21:54
|
2008/6/18 Ian Gent <ip...@cs...>: > > On 18 Jun 2008, at 22:01, Gregory Maxwell wrote: > >> Is it the intended behavior that solutions which differ only in >> non-printed variables be treated as distinct solutions? > > Yes. > > The variables that the search process cares about are the search > variables. However (and this is one thing we will change recently), at the moment you should NOT only put a few of your variables in the search ordering, as in some cases this can lead to you getting incorrect solutions (as Minion doesn't check that all the other variables take values). Very soon, we intend to change this behaviour, so Minion does search over all the variables not in the variable ordering, but only looks for a single solution to them. Chris |
From: Ian G. <ip...@cs...> - 2008-06-18 21:14:18
|
On 18 Jun 2008, at 22:01, Gregory Maxwell wrote: > Is it the intended behavior that solutions which differ only in > non-printed variables be treated as distinct solutions? Yes. The variables that the search process cares about are the search variables. > I found this > somewhat surprising. I see your point. I doubt we will change this soon though. -- Ian Gent School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, UK, KY15 9SX http://www.cs.st-and.ac.uk/~ipg. +44 1334 463247. ip...@cs... The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland : No SC013532 |
From: Gregory M. <gma...@gm...> - 2008-06-18 21:01:51
|
Is it the intended behavior that solutions which differ only in non-printed variables be treated as distinct solutions? I found this somewhat surprising. |
From: Ian G. <ip...@cs...> - 2008-06-18 20:44:47
|
On 18 Jun 2008, at 21:39, Gregory Maxwell wrote: > The online docs > (http://minion.sourceforge.net/htmlhelp/constraints_occurrence.html) > should probably be updated to note that occurrence() can't take a > variable as the second argument. You're right. > > > Is there any plan on changing that Yes. Probably not in the next release but in the one after that. > , ... or less ideally making it > reifiable (I could get the behavior I want by reifying a copy of the > static case for each possible value in the domain)? I can get the > constraint I want indirectly using aliases, dummy variables, and > watchelement but it gets ugly quickly. Alternatively useful would be > a constraint that holds a variable equal to the number of occurrences > of a value in a vector. > > Incidentally, since this is my first post here, I want to say that I > think minion is fantastic software. It's allowed me to explore an > number of interesting problems which would have taken too much work > otherwise. I like the configuration file format and have found it to > be quite easy to learn to use, both directly and by writing > meta-programs that generate input for minion. > Thanks very much! > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. > It's the best place to buy or sell services for > just about anything Open Source. > http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php > _______________________________________________ > Minion-general mailing list > Min...@li... > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/minion-general -- Ian Gent School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, UK, KY15 9SX http://www.cs.st-and.ac.uk/~ipg. +44 1334 463247. ip...@cs... The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland : No SC013532 |
From: Gregory M. <gma...@gm...> - 2008-06-18 20:39:58
|
The online docs (http://minion.sourceforge.net/htmlhelp/constraints_occurrence.html) should probably be updated to note that occurrence() can't take a variable as the second argument. Is there any plan on changing that, ... or less ideally making it reifiable (I could get the behavior I want by reifying a copy of the static case for each possible value in the domain)? I can get the constraint I want indirectly using aliases, dummy variables, and watchelement but it gets ugly quickly. Alternatively useful would be a constraint that holds a variable equal to the number of occurrences of a value in a vector. Incidentally, since this is my first post here, I want to say that I think minion is fantastic software. It's allowed me to explore an number of interesting problems which would have taken too much work otherwise. I like the configuration file format and have found it to be quite easy to learn to use, both directly and by writing meta-programs that generate input for minion. |
From: Chris J. <ch...@bu...> - 2008-06-17 14:04:46
|
2008/6/17 Tias Guns <tia...@cs...>: > On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:53:25 +0200, Chris Jefferson <ch...@bu...> > wrote: > >> Thank you for your comments! >> >> Fortunately, in the next couple of weeks Minion's documentation should >> improve hugely, as a Constraint Programming Summer School is being >> held in St. Andrews ( http://www-circa.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/cpss2008/ ) in >> which we will be using Minion extensively. We will use your comments >> when making these changes! > > I'll be attending that summer school, that's why I'm already testing it out > a bit on my own models : ) Then I shall see you there! > >> -varorder is another powerful tool, but can be difficult to tune. Look >> out for overtuning for one or two instances. Useful values to try are: >> >> static (default) - goes in the order you list in the 'VARORDER' section. >> conflict - which tries to search variables which have previously >> caused problems. >> sdf - Generally considered the "standard" order most people use. > > Interestingly, I've compared with gecode for some datasets, and minion is > slightly better than gecode if I use the input order as variable ordering. > If i take 'degree_max' (take variable which is most constrained) then gecode > becomes significantly faster. > Would your system allow for a variable ordering similar to 'degree_max' ? > I'm interested to see if minion would outperform gecode, and how it would > scale into 10 000's of variables and constraints. If you compile minion with the option 'WDEG', which you do as follows: make minion MYFLAGS="-DWDEG" Then the variable ordering will gain the option 'wdeg', which I believe does something similar to this. The reason this is not turned on by default is that the code to implement it slows Minion down even when it in not in use. Chris |
From: Tias G. <tia...@cs...> - 2008-06-17 13:07:29
|
On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:53:25 +0200, Chris Jefferson <ch...@bu...> wrote: > Thank you for your comments! > > Fortunately, in the next couple of weeks Minion's documentation should > improve hugely, as a Constraint Programming Summer School is being > held in St. Andrews ( http://www-circa.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/cpss2008/ ) in > which we will be using Minion extensively. We will use your comments > when making these changes! I'll be attending that summer school, that's why I'm already testing it out a bit on my own models : ) > As you say, the "-quiet" and "-verbose" flags only effect the parser. > They should probably be renamed. > > You are also right that the "-printsol" option never does anything. > Sorry about that. > > The 'PRINT' statement and any command line flags are supposed to > forfill different roles. The 'PRINT' statement decides which variables > should be printed, as in many problems there are lots of variables > whose values we do not care about. This set cannot be changed from the > command line, the only choice which can be made is how things are > actually printed. > > you might want to look at the "-tableout" option, which puts a number > of useful facts into another file, including size of search and time > taken. Then you could seperate reading the solutions and reading info > about search. > > In terms of making Minion go faster however, there are some more > useful options available to you. You may have to experiment with > these: > > ... Thanks for the tips, but my problem uses only binary variables, and (reified) linear constraints on them, so bounds are not relevant and consistency isn't really influential. > -varorder is another powerful tool, but can be difficult to tune. Look > out for overtuning for one or two instances. Useful values to try are: > > static (default) - goes in the order you list in the 'VARORDER' section. > conflict - which tries to search variables which have previously > caused problems. > sdf - Generally considered the "standard" order most people use. Interestingly, I've compared with gecode for some datasets, and minion is slightly better than gecode if I use the input order as variable ordering. If i take 'degree_max' (take variable which is most constrained) then gecode becomes significantly faster. Would your system allow for a variable ordering similar to 'degree_max' ? I'm interested to see if minion would outperform gecode, and how it would scale into 10 000's of variables and constraints. Greetings, Tias |
From: Chris J. <ch...@bu...> - 2008-06-12 19:53:27
|
Thank you for your comments! Fortunately, in the next couple of weeks Minion's documentation should improve hugely, as a Constraint Programming Summer School is being held in St. Andrews ( http://www-circa.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/cpss2008/ ) in which we will be using Minion extensively. We will use your comments when making these changes! As you say, the "-quiet" and "-verbose" flags only effect the parser. They should probably be renamed. You are also right that the "-printsol" option never does anything. Sorry about that. The 'PRINT' statement and any command line flags are supposed to forfill different roles. The 'PRINT' statement decides which variables should be printed, as in many problems there are lots of variables whose values we do not care about. This set cannot be changed from the command line, the only choice which can be made is how things are actually printed. you might want to look at the "-tableout" option, which puts a number of useful facts into another file, including size of search and time taken. Then you could seperate reading the solutions and reading info about search. In terms of making Minion go faster however, there are some more useful options available to you. You may have to experiment with these: 1) See if you can tighten the bounds of the domains of the variables. 2) Look at the following options. Unfortunatly we can't give any hard guidance on these, you just have to try them: -preprocess does more work before search, to hopefully reduce the size of search. It has 5 settings, which go in terms of increasing time. GAC (the default), SACBounds, SAC, SSACBounds, SSAC. Note that higher settings for these can take a LONG time, over an hour for very large problems, and might not produce any gain! -varorder is another powerful tool, but can be difficult to tune. Look out for overtuning for one or two instances. Useful values to try are: static (default) - goes in the order you list in the 'VARORDER' section. conflict - which tries to search variables which have previously caused problems. sdf - Generally considered the "standard" order most people use. One final option, which helps in some rare cases, is: -X-prop-node SAC Which runs a higher level of work at every node of search. This is however rarely it. (Note, the "-X" part means this flag may change, get renamed, or disappear without notice!) Chris |
From: Chris J. <ch...@bu...> - 2008-06-12 14:31:22
|
Hello, Many apologises, but the Sourceforge Minion SVN server is currently broken (in fact, empty). It should be back some time later today. Apologises for any inconvinence! Chris |
From: Tias G. <tia...@cs...> - 2008-06-11 15:14:24
|
Hello, I'm playing a bit with minion, I'm curious if there would be any speed gain for the models I'm using. I'm always interested in finding all solutions, which can easely run up to the 10 000's. Currently I'm a bit surprised by the switches and what they do or do not do: The -quiet switch, it didn't make the program any quieter. After checking the documentation I found out it only makes the parsing more quiet, which is also valid, but a bit counter intuitive for me. The -printsolsonly was the one I wanted, but unfortunately this switch seems to remove the timing information too. The -printsols does not seem to override 'PRINT NONE', so I don't really understand when it can be used I'm fine with the way it works now, just wanted to inform you that this might be confusing. Lastly, in your online documentation (http://minion.sourceforge.net/htmlhelp/index.html) not all constraints are listed, for example 'sumgeq' and 'sumleq' are not. Greetings, Tias |
From: Chris J. <ch...@bu...> - 2008-01-15 21:12:34
|
On 15 Jan 2008 14:23:33 +0100, Tommy Persson <tp...@id...> wrote: > > I tried to use Minion in another program but noticed that the code > does not seem to be written with that in mind. For example a lot of > the header files are missin guards for including it more than > once. That I could work around but I then got some problems with > internal states. It works the first call but in the second call > internal variables and locks are not cleared. I tested with the 0.4.1 > version > > What I wanted to have was a CORBA server that recieved requests to > solve a problem and i wanted to use Minion internally. Is this > possible with a reasonable amount of work or shoud I give up? Hi Tommy, Using the new svn version, this is somewhat easier. The way I would advising doing this consists of two tasks: 1) Build a CSPInstance that represents your CSP. You can either do this by looking at how the parser does it, or by building a text representation of your CSP and feeding it into the existing parser. This would actually be quite easy, as ConcreteFileReader can be templated by an std::ostringstream, so you could turn your CSP into a string, then feed it in, without having to write to a file. 2) The new 'stateObj' framework allows multiple CSPs to be constructed. Note that you can still only use each 'stateObj' for one CSP, after you've used it you'll have to delete it and then make a new one for a new CSP. Make sure you compile with the 'REENTER' flag turned on if you want to use stateObj. Without this flag some hacks are performed to ensure only one stateObj can be used. This speeds things up but means you can only solve one problem in any once instance. While what you are talking about is certainly possible, as you've found Minion has not really been designed to be a well-behaved library. It can certainly be used as a library, and I have in a couple of applications, but it requires some work and there is a reasonable good chance you will find a bug or two along the way. Of course, we'll try to fix any bugs you find, but it's likely to be a bit of work. Sorry if this sounds worrying.. Chris |
From: Ian G. <ip...@cs...> - 2008-01-15 18:43:49
|
Hi Tommy 0.5.0 is now out. Ian On 15 Jan 2008, at 14:55, Tommy Persson wrote: > Ian Gent <ip...@cs...> writes: > >> Tommy >> >> Many thanks for your interest. >> >> Any day now (literally) we should have 0.5.0 out, which will be very >> similar to the current svn. One change is that the internal state >> problem you mention is addressed, though you have to recompile with >> an >> appropriate flag. > > OK, then I will wait or look at the svn version. If you can call the > reader with a string also and not just the filename that would be very > good... > >> Your application sounds interesting. Can you say any more about it? >> I would exercise extreme caution using Minion in a safety critical >> system of course, given its current state. > > It is a research project (the research group is described here > http://www.ida.liu.se/~patdo/auttek/introduction/index.html) focused > on multi-agent systems and we need to have some CSP solvers available > as kind of a tool box and I looked around to see what I could find > that was implemented in C or C++ and I found some systems but some of > them did not compile with a modern C++ compiler so I think that Minion > was the only one that worked directly. > > It is a research project so if it works in experiemts and demo it is > OK. When you say current state do you mean that the software is > relatively new so there is probably a lot of bugs left? Or is there > some other reason not to trust the result? > > -- > /Tommy Persson -- Ian Gent School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, UK, KY15 9SX http://www.cs.st-and.ac.uk/~ipg. +44 1334 463247. ip...@cs... |
From: Ian G. <ip...@cs...> - 2008-01-15 18:43:49
|
Hi Tommy 0.5.0 is now out. Ian On 15 Jan 2008, at 14:55, Tommy Persson wrote: > Ian Gent <ip...@cs...> writes: > >> Tommy >> >> Many thanks for your interest. >> >> Any day now (literally) we should have 0.5.0 out, which will be very >> similar to the current svn. One change is that the internal state >> problem you mention is addressed, though you have to recompile with >> an >> appropriate flag. > > OK, then I will wait or look at the svn version. If you can call the > reader with a string also and not just the filename that would be very > good... > >> Your application sounds interesting. Can you say any more about it? >> I would exercise extreme caution using Minion in a safety critical >> system of course, given its current state. > > It is a research project (the research group is described here > http://www.ida.liu.se/~patdo/auttek/introduction/index.html) focused > on multi-agent systems and we need to have some CSP solvers available > as kind of a tool box and I looked around to see what I could find > that was implemented in C or C++ and I found some systems but some of > them did not compile with a modern C++ compiler so I think that Minion > was the only one that worked directly. > > It is a research project so if it works in experiemts and demo it is > OK. When you say current state do you mean that the software is > relatively new so there is probably a lot of bugs left? Or is there > some other reason not to trust the result? > > -- > /Tommy Persson -- Ian Gent School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, UK, KY15 9SX http://www.cs.st-and.ac.uk/~ipg. +44 1334 463247. ip...@cs... |
From: Ian G. <ip...@cs...> - 2008-01-15 16:13:06
|
On 15 Jan 2008, at 14:55, Tommy Persson wrote: > It is a research project so if it works in experiemts and demo it is > OK. When you say current state do you mean that the software is > relatively new so there is probably a lot of bugs left? Or is there > some other reason not to trust the result? There are some bugs but they are reduced since we improved our testing. However I more meant that we do not tell you exactly what ranges integers work on, and that kind of thing. Ian -- Ian Gent School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, UK, KY15 9SX http://www.cs.st-and.ac.uk/~ipg. +44 1334 463247. ip...@cs... |
From: Tommy P. <tp...@id...> - 2008-01-15 14:55:48
|
Ian Gent <ip...@cs...> writes: > Tommy > > Many thanks for your interest. > > Any day now (literally) we should have 0.5.0 out, which will be very > similar to the current svn. One change is that the internal state > problem you mention is addressed, though you have to recompile with an > appropriate flag. OK, then I will wait or look at the svn version. If you can call the reader with a string also and not just the filename that would be very good... > Your application sounds interesting. Can you say any more about it? > I would exercise extreme caution using Minion in a safety critical > system of course, given its current state. It is a research project (the research group is described here http://www.ida.liu.se/~patdo/auttek/introduction/index.html) focused on multi-agent systems and we need to have some CSP solvers available as kind of a tool box and I looked around to see what I could find that was implemented in C or C++ and I found some systems but some of them did not compile with a modern C++ compiler so I think that Minion was the only one that worked directly. It is a research project so if it works in experiemts and demo it is OK. When you say current state do you mean that the software is relatively new so there is probably a lot of bugs left? Or is there some other reason not to trust the result? -- /Tommy Persson |
From: Ian G. <ip...@cs...> - 2008-01-15 13:44:32
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Tommy Many thanks for your interest. Any day now (literally) we should have 0.5.0 out, which will be very similar to the current svn. One change is that the internal state problem you mention is addressed, though you have to recompile with an appropriate flag. Sorry to be a bit vague here: hopefully somebody more expert can answer in more detail. I also believe you can pipe an input into Minion in Unix. On the CORBA thing I'm going to keep quiet. Your application sounds interesting. Can you say any more about it? I would exercise extreme caution using Minion in a safety critical system of course, given its current state. Ian On 15 Jan 2008, at 13:23, Tommy Persson wrote: > > I tried to use Minion in another program but noticed that the code > does not seem to be written with that in mind. For example a lot of > the header files are missin guards for including it more than > once. That I could work around but I then got some problems with > internal states. It works the first call but in the second call > internal variables and locks are not cleared. I tested with the 0.4.1 > version > > What I wanted to have was a CORBA server that recieved requests to > solve a problem and i wanted to use Minion internally. Is this > possible with a reasonable amount of work or shoud I give up? > > I can I assume call Minion as an external program. But then I have to > write a file with the problem and I wanted to use it in an autonomous > helicopter were we do not have a writeable file system so that will > not work so good... > > Is the svn version better in this respect? > > -- > /Tommy Persson > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. > It's the best place to buy or sell services for > just about anything Open Source. > http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace > _______________________________________________ > Minion-general mailing list > Min...@li... > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/minion-general -- Ian Gent School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, UK, KY15 9SX http://www.cs.st-and.ac.uk/~ipg. +44 1334 463247. ip...@cs... |