| Article ID: | iaor2005657 |
| Country: | Netherlands |
| Volume: | 130 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Start Page Number: | 41 |
| End Page Number: | 56 |
| Publication Date: | Aug 2004 |
| Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
| Authors: | Trick Michael A., Bosch Robert |
| Keywords: | programming: integer |
Conway's game of Life provides an interesting testbed for exploring issues in formulation, symmetry, and optimization with constraint programming and hybrid constraint programming/integer programming methods. We consider three Life pattern-creation problems: finding maximum density still-Lifes, finding smallest immediate predecessor patterns, and finding period-2 oscillators. For the first two problems, integrating integer programming and constraint programming approaches provides a much better solution procedure than either individually. For the final problem, the constraint programming formulation provides the better approach.