Scott H. Clearwater, Bernardo A. Huberman and Tad Hogg
Dynamics of Computation Group
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Palo Alto, CA 94304
hogg@parc.xerox.com
@ARTICLE {,
AUTHOR = "Scott H. Clearwater and Bernardo A. Huberman and Tad Hogg",
TITLE = "Cooperative Solution of Constraint Satisfaction Problems",
JOURNAL = "Science",
VOLUME = "254",
PAGES = "1181-1183",
MONTH = "November 22",
YEAR = "1991"}
It is widely believed that a group of cooperating agents engaged in
problem solving can solve a task faster than either a single agent or
the same group of agents working in isolation from each other.
Nevertheless, little is known about the quantitative improvements that
result from cooperation. A number of experimental results are presented
on constraint satisfaction that both test the predictions of a theory of
cooperative problem solving and provide an assessment of the value of
cooperation for this class of problems. These experiments suggest an
alternative methodology to existing techniques for solving constraint
satisfaction problems in computer science and distributed artificial
intelligence.
postcript (106K, available on-line only within Xerox)