The mancoosi project has organised MISC 2010 (for Mancoosi International Solver Competition), the first international competition of solvers for package/component installation and upgrade problems during the summer of 2010. The motivation and general principles of the MISC competition are outlined here.

The optimisation criteria used 2010

We have used two different optimization criteria, each of them constituting a different track of the competition. Both are lexicographic combinations of some simple integer valued utility functions of a solution, which we summarize below. A precise definition can be found here.

  • paranoid: we want to answer the user request, minimizing the number of packages removed in the solution, and also the packages changed by the solution;
  • trendy: we want to answer the user request, minimizing the number of packages removed in the solution, minimizing the number of outdated packages in the solution, minimizing the number of package recommendations that are not satisfied, and finally minimizing the number of extra packages installed.

Organization of the 2010 competition

The timeline was:

Declaration of ParticipationMay 31, 2010
Submission of SolversJune 13, 2010, 23h59 UT
Announcement of ResultsJuly 10, 2010

The results were announced at the International Workshop on Logics for Component Configuration (LoCoCo 2010) on July 10, 2010, in Edinburgh.

For reference, the more detailed description of the procedure was announced like this.

Links to important resources

The participants of the 2010 competition

  • apt-pbo: Caixa Magica's apt-get replacement using a PBO solver
  • aspcud: a CUDF-Solver based on Answer Set Programming using Potassco, the Potsdam Answer Set Solving Collection.
  • inesc: a SAT-based solver using the p2cudf parser (from Eclipse) and the MaxSAT solver MSUnCore.
  • p2cudf: a family of solvers on top of the Eclipse Provisioning Platform p2, based on the SAT4J library.
    See here for the detailed description.
  • ucl: a solver based on graph constraints
  • unsa: a solver built using ILOG's CPLEX

And the Winner is ...

See here for the results of both tracks.

The full set of data used to run the 2010 edition of MISC, together with all the results for all the entrants, can be accessed here.