chocoteam / choco-tuto Goto Github PK

I am going to list down a series priority concepts and components I think are key for beginners to understand, especially from my own point of view in the sense of which of those I had more trouble with while learning Choco. I also think a good way of putting all this together when developing the tutorial is with detailed examples, and wrap it on the actual explanations (just like the n-queens example in the tutorial, but more of them, more detailed and more complex as the tutorial goes).

• Type of variables: add "real" examples for IntVar, BoolVar, SetVar and RealVar. This way learners can see what these variables can be used for in different scenarios.
• Home-made constraints, all of them: what they're for, and examples. I know this can be a pain in the ass since there are like 80 different built-in constraints if I remember correctly, but when I used Choco I remember just being confused in the docs looking at constraints I didn't even know what they were for and if they could apply to my problem. I think it's vital that the user knows what tools are available for him, and constraints are absolutely key to master when using Choco.
• How to create custom constraints. I think this one is very important. I did not find any intuitive way of doing this and I actually created 0 custom constraints when I used Choco for months, simply because I had no idea how and could not figure out from the docs/guide. Probably the possibilities with this are limitless, especially since there are different type of variables, but I think a good set of examples would help a lot. By the way, I saw just one an example of how to implement a custom constraint, but I couldn't figure out anything out of it because it was explained very lighly.
• Search strategies: go through the ones existing, explain what they do and how they're different to the other strategies, what situations to apply them, see how they might impact resolution performace, etc...
• Custom search strategies. I can't even get in detail here because I think you could also define custom heuristics. But I never figured out how to do this from the docs or guide. I might be wrong but I think custom search strategies is a feature Choco presents, and should be great if more information about the topic was given in a tutorial.

Then I know there are a bunch of advanced components, plugged monitors, etc... but I never got so deep into the library. But again, if I had found resources that helped me understand these components I would have probably went as deep as these resources let me.

I am going to think of more features I think would be important to include in the tutorials, which I am sure there are many, but so far all these four I listed down are by far the most basic and important ones in my opinions.