I just received a notification from Google Scholar that Automated Configuration and Selection of SAT Solvers by Holger Hoos, Frank Hutter, and Kevin Leyton-Brown provided the 100th citation of my paper with Susan Epstein, Richard Wallace, Anton Morozov, and Bruce Samuels on The Adaptive Constraint Engine. Which is cool, but the funny thing is that when I was scanning my mailbox, “configuration” caught my eye, and I thought that the citation would be to my work on configuration.

There has been a long series of configuration workshops, going back to one organized by Boi Faltings, Gerhard Friedrich and myself in 1999. To quote from the call for papers for the 2020 workshop: “Configuration is as a special type of design approach where the product being configured is composed from instances of a set of predefined component types that can be combined in ways defined by a set of constraints.”

Configuration provides a great example of the practical application of constraint satisfaction. A good place to see this is a 2016 paper in AI Magazine by Andreas Falkner, Gerhard Friedrich, Alois Haselböck, Gottfried Schenner, and Herwig Schreiner on Twenty-Five Years of Successful Application of Constraint Technologies at Siemens.