Bøker av Thom Fruhwirth

Programming with constraints makes it possible to model and specify problems with uncertain, incomplete information and to solve combi natorial problems, as they are abundant in industry and commerce, such as scheduling, planning, transportation, resource allocation, layout, design, and analysis.

Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is both a theoretical formalism based on logic and a practical programming language based on rules. This book, written by the creator of CHR, describes the theory of CHR and how to use it in practice. It is supported by a website containing teaching materials, online demos, and free downloads of the language. After a basic tutorial, the author describes in detail the CHR language and discusses guaranteed properties of CHR programs. The author then compares CHR with other formalisms and languages and illustrates how it can capture their essential features. Finally, larger programs are introduced and analyzed in detail. The book is ideal for graduate students and lecturers, and for more experienced programmers and researchers, who can use it for self-study. Exercises with selected solutions, and bibliographic remarks are included at the ends of chapters. The book is the definitive reference on the subject.

Mason's marks (Steinmetzzeichen) are symbols carved by stonecutters on dressed stone. These signs go back about 4500 years. In Europe, one can mainly find quarrier's marks from the medieval ages. In Architectural History, stonemason's marks allow to reconstruct the construction process of a building. Mason's marks can be concisely represented by planar line graphs using basic Computational Geometry.This text shortly introduces mason's marks and the implementation of the software tool VanDeGraphGenerator to draw, analyse, and generate graphs in the declarative programming language Constraint Handling Rules. This book then features sixty choice mason's marks from Ulm Minster, Strasbourg Cathedral, and Iglesia Arciprestal de Santiago in Spain.Exploiting the inherent structural regularities of mason's marks, VanDeGraphGenerator can assemble new designs automatically using methods from Artificial Intelligence research to achieve a kind of Computational Creativity. The main part of the book showcases more than thousand new designs produced by the tool.