REF-ARF: A system for solving problems stated as procedures

摘要

This paper describes an effort to design a heuristic problem-solving program which accepts problems stated in a nondeterministic programming language and applies constraint satisfaction methods and heuristic search methods to find solutions. The use of nondeterministic programming languages for stating problems is discussed, and ref, the language accepted by the problem solver arf, is described. Various extensions to ref are considered. The conceptual structure of the program is described in detail and various possibilities for extending it are discussed. The use of the input language and the behaviour of the program are described and analyzed in sixteen sample problems.