Announce: Scala Monadic Constraint Solver (smocs) v0.5

[Steve Vickers]

Hi everyone,

This announcement is both intimidating and exciting for me.  Intimidating as I've never

posted to this group and exciting as I welcome community interaction regarding the

Scala Monadic Constraint Solver (smocs) project located at:

https://github.com/osxhacker/smocs

The goal of this project is to provide a Constraint Satisfaction Problem solver using

monadic programming techniques.  It is licensed under a BSD 3-clause license and is

intended to serve as a learning tool for developers to incorporate CSP engines into

real-world situations, be a production quality CSP library in and of itself, as well as

to give back to the Open Source community which has done so much for me

(sorry for getting a bit sappy on that last one).

Pull requests are welcome with the following caveats:

- Changes must be accompanied by some form of test case verifying the modification.

- Types and public methods are encouraged to have comments as to why they exist.

It's completely understandable to expect others to deduce how things work, or when

they are used, but *why* something exists can be difficult to derive strictly

from code.

The Wiki is admittingly thin and shall continue to be enriched.  Probably the best

places to get acclimated with Smocs as it stands is to look at the following Use-Case

tests:

SolvePolynomialEquationUseCase.scala (simple algebraic equation)

SolvePositionalEquationUseCase.scala (solve for "where" a variable is relative to others)

SolveKnapsackProblemSpec.scala (Tree-based CSP to solve the Knapsack problem)

SolveAllIntervalsUseCase.scala (solves a 5-element "all intervals" CSP)

Please pose any questions/concerns/issues you may have on http://stackoverflow.com

(yet another thing needing to be added to the GitHub Wiki :-)).

Thanks and I look forward to hearing from the community!

Steve