[rules-dev] [solver] ITC2007 competition results

[Geoffrey De Smet]

Hi guys,

I finished 4th with my drools-solver implementation of the examination 
track:
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/winner/finalorder.htm

There's much to learn from the other implementations for drools-solver.
For example, the winner is also using local search (as are most of the 
others), but he use meta-heuristics to run 3 phases instead of 1, 
selects his moves a lot smarter and just basically tweaked his 
configuration a lot better.

Surprisingly, I actually got the best overal result on dataset10: it 
will be interesting to find out why (could be tweaking luck though).
I 'll be identifying the features which drools-solver is missing and 
incorporating them soon.
Since the end of the competition, the trunk has already gained 10% 
performance (due to removing shadow facts etc).

I've also done an implementation of the curriculum course track after 
the competition ended, in less than 16 workings hours.
The mere development speed, maintainability and runtime performance 
(after initialization...) of DRL score rules is very very promising.

-- 
With kind regards,
Geoffrey De Smet