[mercury-users] Mercury applications, AI, backtracking

[Fergus Henderson]

On 14-Sep-1998, Don Smith <dsmith at cs.waikato.ac.nz> wrote:
> 
> One thing that concerns me, though, is that for constraint-based
> applications, chronological backtracking is often inappropriate. You
> may claim that you can implement intelligent backtracking on top of
> chronological backtracking, but if the language doesn't provide
> explicit support, it's hard to code it efficiently and you end up
> rolling your own.  Heuristic search needs flexible support for 
> committed choice nondeterminism, I think.

I think it would be helpful if someone could give a pointer to one or
two examples of constraint-based applications for which chronological
backtracking is not appropriate.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.