Release Candidate 1 for Minion 0.7.0 was made available on June 28 2008

MINION is a new constraint solver, which is very fast and scales well as problem size increases. Empirical results on standard benchmarks show orders of magnitude performance gains over state-of-the-art constraint toolkits. These gains increase with problem size --- MINION delivers scalable constraint solving.

MINION is a general-purpose constraint solver, with an expressive input language based on the common constraint modelling device of matrix models. Focussing on matrix models supports a lean, highly-optimised implementation. This contrasts with current constraint toolkits, which, in order to provide ever more modelling and solving options, have become progressively more complex at the cost of both performance and usability.

MINION is a black box from the user point of view, deliberately providing few options. This, combined with its raw speed, makes MINION a substantial step towards Puget's `Model and Run' constraint solving paradigm.

MINION is still in the beta stage of development. Bugs can be expected. However we endeavour to fix bugs promptly after they have been reported.

Minion is Open Source software, licensed under GNU General Public License Version 2. Minion is maintained as a SourceForge project. There is a MINION mailing list, details of which can be found at: http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=159145

If you find MINION useful we would be very interested to hear of your successes or failures.

News

• June 30, 2008. Release Candidate 1 of MINION 0.7.0 is available. There are numerous significant changes and also a greatly expanded manual including tutorial material. It can be downloaded from our download page.
• May 17, 2008. MINION 0.6.0 has been released. The major changes are
  • Bugs fixed:
  • -check was always enabled. This slowed down problems which found many solutions (hundreds per second)
  • New features:
  • hamming, watchedvecexists_less, watchedvecexists_and, negativetable.
  • Faster performance at root node.
  • New algorithm for solving problems whose solutions for a group.
  • Accept gzipped and bzip2ed input.
  • Better error messages from invalid command line options or input files.
  • -check now faster when activated.
  • Documentation improvements.
  • Many internal improvements and cleanups.
• February 8, 2008. MINION 0.5.1 has been released. The major changes are
  • The windows version of Minion now requires 'cygwin'.
  • The 'gacelement' constraint has been renamed 'gacelement-deprecated'.
  • Several bugfixes and minor improvements.
  • You can read more at the detailed changelog.
• January 17, 2008. MINION 0.5.0 has been released. The major changes are
  • considerable stability improvements
  • several bugfixes
  • new, enhanced input format

• May 9, 2007 The current svn-version of MINION contains a translator that creates MINION instances from Essence' problem models. More information about this translator (including examples) can be found here.