In 1996 the paper “In Pursuit of the Holy Grail” (also here) proposed that Constraint Programming was well-positioned to pursue the Holy Grail of computer science: the user simply states the problem and the computer solves it. It was followed about a decade later by “Holy Grail Redux“, and then about a decade after that by “Progress Towards the Holy Grail“. This series of workshops aims to encourage and disseminate progress towards that goal, in particular regarding work on automating:

• Problem Acquisition: learning, debugging, reformulating, maintaining, etc. 
• Solver Construction: automated parameter tuning, portfolio selection, heuristic discovery, etc. 
• User Explanation: reasons for failure, implications for choices, etc. 

Of special interest is the intersection of the Holy Grail goal with the increasing attention being paid to machine learning, explainable AI, Human-Centered AI, Human-AI Collaboration, and intelligent software assistants.

Schedule

13.30 – 14.15 — Stefan Szeider: “Neural Meets Symbolic: Synergies Between Language Models and Constraint Reasoning”, joint invited talk with LLM-Solve workshop
14.15 – 15.00 — Peter Stuckey: “Progress towards the Holy Grail: Solving”
15.00 – 15.30 — Coffee Break
15.30 – 16.00 — Hendrik Bierlee, Dimos Tsouros, Senne Berden, and Tias Guns: “ML-guided and Robust Constraint Acquisition”
16.00 – 17.30 — Panel “Are LLMs the missing piece to get us to the Holy Grail?” (joint with LLM-Solve workshop)