[CA] ================================================ AMAST Links 02 05

      CP'95 Workshop on Studying and Solving Really Hard Problems
             Cassis / Marseille, France, 23 september 1995 

   The full version of this announcement is available at URL:
   http://www.cs.utwente.nl/data/amast/links/v02/i05/full/AC0205CA.txt

  Many interesting problems studied in the area of constraint
programming are NP-hard. The canonical example is the Boolean
satisfiability problem (SAT), which provides an efficient encoding for
all other NP-complete problems.  Despite the fact that these problems
are inherently intractable (unless P=NP), a large number of methods
have been proposed in recent years to solve such problems in practice,
such as Stochastic Search, Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithms,
Tabu search, Heuristics, Local Propagation etc. In order to evaluate
these methods, there has been much recent activity on identifying the
hardest problem instances of the various problem classes.  These
hardest instances are often located in a phase transitions region in
the problem space. Further insights into the hardest problem instances
also come from the study of tractable sublasses of intractable
problems, such as, Horn theories, acyclic CSPs, etc.
  This workshop tries to explore new advances in these domains. So,
the topics of interests include the folowing (non exhaustive list) :
complete versus incomplete algorithms, probabalistics algorithms,
heuristics, polynomial classes of instances, transition phase on
random problems.
  Authors are invited to submit papers not exceeding 18 pages, printed
in 12pt, to the address below. Shorter papers (around 4 pages) are also
acceptable. We encourage authors to submit by electronic mail,
preferably in self-contained Postscript printable files. However, a
printed reference copy should be sent anyway by express / courier mail.
Each submission, by ordinary mail or by e-mail, should be accompanied
by a separate message to jegou@gyptis.univ-mrs.fr with a single postal
and e-mail address for communication, complete title, author(s),
affiliation(s) and 200 word abstract.
  *Address:*
   Jihad Jaam; LIM - URA CNRS 1787; Faculte des Sciences de Luminy
   163, avenue de Luminy, Case 901; F-13288 Marseille Cedex 9; France