Constraint Processing

What Hacker News says

1. saosebastiaoMar 2017
   On expert systems specifically no. With the AI winter of the early 90's, not only did expert systems research die, but so did publisher interest in the topic. "Expert Systems" is effectively a dead field of study.

   That being said, the field of Operations Research, at least philosophically speaking, has picked up where AI researchers dropped it off. They've fully embraced the idea that human experts can model many systems extremely well, and have built incredible tools to do so: mathematical modeling and optimization, constraint programming, boolsat, graphical models, etc. Effectively speaking, if you think expert systems are cool, the next logical step is to delve into constraint programming, which is a sort of evolution of logic programming. I'd recommend the Minizinc Tutorial for a practical introduction with a nice DSL. Constraint Processing by Rina Dechter is a great intro with a more academic bent. I'd say mathematical modeling has been Ops Research's greatest success, and I'd definitely recommend Model Building with Mathematical Programming by Paul Williams.

   I'd also say that Baysians have embraced these ideas (that of building upon human expertise) within the field of Machine Learning far more than other ML researchers have. My recommendations here are probably less helpful...I've only ever toyed with Bayesian learning models, but never employed them professionally. But I would recommend Doing Bayesian Data Analysis by Kruschke. It was very helpful as an introductory material.

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2. gruseomMay 2010
   If anyone wants to learn constraint programming, as I needed to do a few months ago, the two best books I found are this one, which is a general introduction:

   http://www.amazon.com/Constraint-Processing-Kaufmann-Artific...

   ... and this one, which is a survey of the literature:

   http://www.amazon.com/Constraint-Programming-Foundations-Art...

   None of the other books I looked at was even close to as useful as these. Maybe this will save somebody some trouble.

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