Premium
CBack: A simple tool for backtrack programming in C
Author(s) -
Helsgaun Keld
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.4380250805
Subject(s) - computer science , compiler , programming language , simple (philosophy) , ansi c , inductive programming , procedural programming , programming paradigm , heuristic , artificial intelligence , philosophy , epistemology
Backtrack programming is such a powerful technique for problem solving that a number of languages, especially in the area of artificial intelligence, have built‐in facilities for backtrack programming. This paper describes CBack, a simple, but general tool for backtrack programming in the programming language C. The use of the tool is illustrated through examples of a tutorial nature. In addition to the usual depth‐first search strategy, CBack provides for the more general heuristic best‐first search strategy. The implementation of CBack is described in detail. The source code, shown in its full length, is entirely written in ANSI C and highly portable across diverse computer architectures and C compilers.