CS 106: Artificial Intelligence

Constraint Satisfaction Problems

Instructor: Ngoc-Hoang LUONG, PhD

University of Information Technology (UIT), VNU-HCM
[These slides were adapted from the slides created by Dan Klein and Pieter Abbeel for CS188 Intro to AI at UC Berkeley. http://ai.berkeley.edu.]
 What is Search For?
▪ Assumptions about the world: a single agent, deterministic actions, fully observed
state, discrete state space

▪ Planning: sequences of actions

▪ The path to the goal is the important thing
▪ Paths have various costs, depths
▪ Heuristics give problem-specific guidance

▪ Identification: assignments to variables

▪ The goal itself is important, not the path
▪ All paths at the same depth (for some formulations)
▪ CSPs are specialized for identification problems
Constraint Satisfaction Problems
 Constraint Satisfaction Problems

▪ Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs):

▪ A special subset of search problems
▪ State is defined by variables Xi with values from a
domain D (sometimes D depends on i)
▪ Goal test is a set of constraints specifying allowable
combinations of values for subsets of variables

▪ Allows useful general-purpose algorithms with more

power than standard search algorithms
 Constraint Satisfaction Problems
▪

https://www.cs.upc.edu/~erodri/webpage/cps/cps.html
Constraint Graphs
 Constraint Graphs
▪ Binary CSP: each constraint relates (at most) two
variables

▪ Binary constraint graph: nodes are variables, arcs

show constraints

▪ General-purpose CSP algorithms use the graph

structure to speed up search.
CSP Examples
 Example: Map Coloring
▪

Implicit:

Explicit:
 Example: N-Queens
▪ Variables:
♛
▪ Domains: ♛
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▪ Constraints: ♛

Implicit:
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Explicit:
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Example: Sudoku
▪ Variables:
▪ Each (open) square
▪ Domains:
▪ {1,2,…,9}
▪ Constraints:

9-way alldiff for each column

9-way alldiff for each row
9-way alldiff for each region
Varieties of CSPs and Constraints
 Varieties of CSPs
▪ Discrete Variables
▪ Finite domains
▪ Size d means O(dn) complete assignments
▪ E.g., Boolean CSPs, including Boolean satisfiability
(NP-complete)
▪ Infinite domains (integers, strings, etc.)
▪ E.g., job scheduling, variables are start/end times for each job

▪ Continuous variables
▪ E.g., start/end times for Hubble Telescope observations
 Varieties of Constraints

▪
 Real-World CSPs
▪ Assignment problems: e.g., who teaches what class
▪ Timetabling problems: e.g., which class is offered when and where?
▪ Hardware configuration
▪ Transportation scheduling
▪ Factory scheduling
▪ Circuit layout
▪ Fault diagnosis
▪ … lots more!

▪ Many real-world problems involve real-valued variables…

Solving CSPs
 Standard Search Formulation
▪ Standard search formulation of CSPs

▪ States defined by the values assigned

so far (partial assignments)
▪ Initial state: the empty assignment, {}
▪ Successor function: assign a value to an
unassigned variable
▪ Goal test: the current assignment is
complete and satisfies all constraints

▪ We’ll start with the straightforward,

naïve approach, then improve it
 Search Methods
▪ What would BFS do?

♛
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▪ What would DFS do?
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▪ What problems does naïve search have?
 BFS?
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 DFS?
♛ ♛
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…
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♛ ♛ ♛ ♛
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…
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… ♛
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♛ ♛ ♛ ♛
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Backtracking Search
 Backtracking Search
▪ Backtracking search is the basic uninformed algorithm for solving CSPs
▪ Idea 1: One variable at a time
▪ Only need to consider assignments to a single variable at each step

▪ Idea 2: Check constraints as you go

▪ i.e. consider only values which do not conflict previous assignments
▪ Might have to do some computation to check the constraints
▪ “Incremental goal test”

▪ Depth-first search with these two improvements

is called backtracking search (not the best name)
▪ Can solve n-queens for n ≈ 25
 Backtracking Example

♛
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♛ ♛
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Map Coloring with Backtracking

Where are we
now?

https://vi.wikipedia.org/
Map Coloring with Backtracking

https://camranhcitygate.info/
Backtracking Example
 Backtracking Search

▪ Backtracking = DFS + variable-ordering + fail-on-violation

▪ What are the choice points?
https://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~ines/aulas/1617/IA/cspNew.pdf
 Improving Backtracking

▪ General-purpose ideas give huge gains in speed

▪ Filtering: Can we detect inevitable failure early?

▪ Ordering:
▪ Which variable should be assigned next?
▪ In what order should its values be tried?

▪ Structure: Can we exploit the problem structure?

Filtering
 Filtering: Forward Checking
▪ Filtering: Keep track of domains for unassigned variables and cross off bad options
▪ Forward checking: Cross off values that violate a constraint when added to the existing
assignment
 Filtering: Forward Checking

Vạn Ninh Ninh Hòa Khánh Vĩnh Diên Khánh Nha Trang Cam Lâm Khánh Sơn Cam Ranh Trường Sa
 Filtering: Constraint Propagation
▪ Forward checking propagates information from assigned to unassigned variables, but
doesn't provide early detection for all failures:

Vạn Ninh Ninh Hòa Khánh Vĩnh Diên Khánh Nha Trang Cam Lâm Khánh Sơn Cam Ranh Trường Sa

▪ Ninh Hòa and Diên Khánh cannot both be green!

▪ Why didn’t we detect this yet?
▪ Constraint propagation: reason from constraint to constraint
 Consistency of A Single Arc
▪ An arc X → Y is consistent iff for every x in the tail there is some y in the head which
could be assigned without violating a constraint
Vạn Ninh Ninh Hòa Khánh Vĩnh Diên Khánh Nha Trang Cam Lâm Khánh Sơn Cam Ranh Trường Sa

Delete from the tail!

▪ Forward checking: Enforcing consistency of arcs pointing to each new assignment
 Consistency of A Single Arc
▪

https://www.cs.upc.edu/~erodri/webpage/cps/cps.html
 Arc Consistency of an Entire CSP
▪ A simple form of propagation makes sure all arcs are consistent:

Vạn Ninh Ninh Hòa Khánh Vĩnh Diên Khánh Nha Trang Cam Lâm Khánh Sơn Cam Ranh Trường Sa

Remember: Delete
from the tail!

▪ Important: If X loses a value, neighbors of X need to be rechecked!

▪ Arc consistency detects failure earlier than forward checking
▪ Can be run as a preprocessor or after each assignment
▪ What’s the downside of enforcing arc consistency?
Enforcing Arc Consistency in a CSP

https://www.cs.upc.edu/~erodri/webpage/cps/cps.html
 Limitations of Arc Consistency

▪ After enforcing arc

consistency:
▪ Can have one solution left
▪ Can have multiple solutions left
▪ Can have no solutions left (and
not know it)

▪ Arc consistency still runs What went

inside a backtracking search! wrong here?
 K-Consistency
▪ Increasing degrees of consistency
▪ 1-Consistency (Node Consistency): Each single node’s domain has a
value which meets that node’s unary constraints

▪ 2-Consistency (Arc Consistency): For each pair of nodes, any

consistent assignment to one can be extended to the other

▪ K-Consistency: For each k nodes, any consistent assignment to k-1 can

be extended to the kth node.

▪ Higher k more expensive to compute

▪ (You need to know the k=2 case: arc consistency)

 Improving Backtracking

▪ General-purpose ideas give huge gains in speed

▪ Filtering: Can we detect inevitable failure early?

▪ Ordering:
▪ Which variable should be assigned next?
▪ In what order should its values be tried?

▪ Structure: Can we exploit the problem structure?

Ordering
 Ordering: Minimum Remaining Values
▪ Variable Ordering: Minimum remaining values (MRV):
▪ Choose the variable with the fewest legal left values in its domain

Vạn Ninh Ninh Hòa Khánh Vĩnh Diên Khánh Nha Trang Cam Lâm Khánh Sơn Cam Ranh Trường Sa
 Ordering: Minimum Remaining Values
▪ Variable Ordering: Minimum remaining values (MRV):
▪ Choose the variable with the fewest legal left values in its domain

▪ Why min rather than max?

▪ Also called “most constrained variable”
▪ “Fail-fast” ordering
 Ordering: Least Constraining Value
▪ Value Ordering: Least Constraining Value
▪ Given a choice of variable, choose the least constraining value
(i.e., the one that rules out the fewest values in the remaining variables).

Vạn Ninh Ninh Hòa Khánh Vĩnh Diên Khánh Nha Trang Cam Lâm Khánh Sơn Cam Ranh Trường Sa
 Ordering: Least Constraining Value
▪ Value Ordering: Least Constraining Value
▪ Given a choice of variable, choose the least
constraining value
▪ I.e., the one that rules out the fewest values in
the remaining variables
▪ Note that it may take some computation to
determine this! (E.g., rerunning filtering)

▪ Why least rather than most?

▪ Combining these ordering ideas makes

1000 queens feasible
 Improving Backtracking

▪ General-purpose ideas give huge gains in speed

▪ Filtering: Can we detect inevitable failure early?

▪ Ordering:
▪ Which variable should be assigned next?
▪ In what order should its values be tried?

▪ Structure: Can we exploit the problem structure?

Structure
 Problem Structure

▪ Extreme case: independent subproblems

▪ Example: Tasmania and mainland do not interact

▪ Independent subproblems are identifiable as

connected components of constraint graph

▪ Suppose a graph of n variables can be broken into

subproblems of only c variables:
▪ Worst-case solution cost is O((n/c)(dc)), linear in n
▪ E.g., n = 80, d = 2, c =20
▪ 280 = 4 billion years at 10 million nodes/sec
▪ (4)(220) = 0.4 seconds at 10 million nodes/sec
 Tree-Structured CSPs

▪ Theorem: if the constraint graph has no loops, the CSP can be solved in O(n d2) time
▪ Compare to general CSPs, where worst-case time is O(dn)
Tree-Structured CSPs
Improving Structure
 Nearly Tree-Structured CSPs

▪ Conditioning: instantiate a variable, prune its neighbors' domains

▪ Cutset conditioning: instantiate (in all ways) a set of variables such that
the remaining constraint graph is a tree
 Choose a cutset
Cutset Conditioning
Instantiate the cutset
(all possible ways) Solve the residual CSPs
(tree structured)
Compute residual CSP
for each assignment
 Cutset Conditioning

Vạn Ninh Ninh Hòa Khánh Vĩnh Diên Khánh Nha Trang Cam Lâm Khánh Sơn Cam Ranh Trường Sa
 Tree-Structured CSP
▪ Algorithm for tree-structured CSPs:
▪ Order: Choose a root variable, order variables so that parents precede children

Vạn Ninh Ninh Hòa Nha Trang Khánh Vĩnh Khánh Sơn Cam Ranh

▪ Remove backward: For i = n : 2, apply Remove-Inconsistency(Parent(Xi),Xi)

▪ Assign forward: For i = 1 : n, assign Xi consistently with Parent(Xi)
Tree-Structured CSP
Iterative Improvement
 Iterative Algorithms for CSPs
▪ Local search methods typically work with “complete” states, i.e., all variables assigned

▪ To apply to CSPs:
▪ Take an assignment with unsatisfied constraints
▪ Operators reassign variable values
▪ No fringe! Live on the edge.

▪ Algorithm: While not solved,

▪ Variable selection: randomly select any conflicted variable
▪ Value selection: min-conflicts heuristic:
▪ Choose a value that violates the fewest constraints
▪ I.e., hill climb with h(n) = total number of violated constraints
 Example: 4-Queens
♛ ♛ ♛ ♛
♛ ♛ 2 1 0 ♛ ♛
♛ ♛ ♛ ♛
♛ ♛ ♛ ♛ 2 0 1

♛ ♛ 0 3 1 ♛
♛ ♛ ♛
♛ ♛ ♛
♛ ♛ ♛
 Performance of Min-Conflicts
▪ Given random initial state, can solve n-queens in almost constant time for arbitrary
n with high probability (e.g., n = 10,000,000)!

▪ The same appears to be true for any randomly-generated CSP except in a narrow
range of the ratio
 Summary: CSPs
▪ CSPs are a special kind of search problem:
▪ States are partial assignments
▪ Goal test defined by constraints
▪ Basic solution: backtracking search

▪ Speed-ups:
▪ Ordering
▪ Filtering
▪ Structure

▪ Iterative min-conflicts is often effective in practice

Local Search
 Local Search
▪ Tree search keeps unexplored alternatives on the fringe (ensures completeness)

▪ Local search: improve a single option until you can’t make it better
▪ New successor function: local changes

▪ Generally much faster and more memory efficient (but incomplete and suboptimal)
▪ Pretty much unavoidable when the state is “yourself”
 Hill Climbing
▪ Simple, general idea:
▪ Start wherever
▪ Repeat: move to the best neighboring state
▪ If no neighbors better than current, quit
Hill Climbing

64
Hill Climbing Diagram
Hill Climbing Quiz

Starting from X, where do you end up ?

Starting from Y, where do you end up ?

Starting from Z, where do you end up ?

 Simulated Annealing
▪ Idea: Escape local maxima by allowing downhill moves
▪ But make them rarer as time goes on

67
 Simulated Annealing
▪ Theoretical guarantee:
▪ Stationary distribution (Boltzmann):
▪ If T decreased slowly enough,
will converge to optimal state!

▪ Is this an interesting guarantee?

▪ Sounds like magic, but reality is reality:

▪ The more downhill steps you need to escape a local optimum,
the less likely you are to ever make them all in a row
▪ “Slowly enough” may mean exponentially slowly
▪ Random restart hillclimbing also converges to optimal state…
 Genetic Algorithms

▪ Genetic algorithms use a natural selection metaphor

▪ Keep best N hypotheses at each step (selection) based on a fitness function
▪ Also have pairwise crossover operators, with optional mutation to give variety

▪ Possibly the most misunderstood, misapplied (and even maligned) technique around
 Example: N-Queens

▪ Why does crossover make sense here?

▪ When wouldn’t it make sense?
▪ What would mutation be?
▪ What would a good fitness function be?