An Application of the Process Mechanism to a Room Allocation Problem Using the pCG Language

The Sisyphus-I initiative consists of a constraint satisfaction problem in which a group of people in a research environment must be allocated rooms. Numerous constraints are detailed by the problem description which together impose a partial ordering on any solution. A solution to Sisyphus-I is presented in order to illustrate pCG, a CG-oriented programming language which embodies Mineau's (1998) state-transition based process mechanism. We consider pCG to be an experimental language and believe that feedback from the CG community would be useful at this stage of development. A non-trivial application with which the community is already familiar is an effective means by which to accomplish this. The solution involves automatic extraction of most of the information required to represent the problem from the Sisyphus-I web page, and a pCG program which produces suitable room allocations via a process. The means by which the presented solution could be further constrained to increase its robustness is briefly discussed, as is the likely future development of pCG.