And the Winner is ...

See here for the results of all tracks.

The full set of data used to run the 2011 edition of MISC, together with all the results for all the entrants, can be accessed here.


The mancoosi project organises MISC 2011 (for Mancoosi International Solver Competition), the second international competition of solvers for package/component installation and upgrade problems during the summer of 2011. The motivation and general principles of the MISC competition are outlined here.

The optimisation criteria

We have three tracks. The first two are the same as for the MISC 2010 competition. All three tracks use as optimization criterion a lexicographic combination of some simple integer valued utility functions of a solution. In the first two tracks the criterion is fixed, while for the third track the precise criterion is part of the problem instance. 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we want to answer the user request, minimizing the number of packages removed in the solution, minimizing the number of outdated packages in the solution, minimizing the number of package recommendations that are not satisfied, and finally minimizing the number of extra packages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.
  • user: we want to answer the user request, and look for an optimal solution according to an optimization criterion provided by the user. The criterion is given by a list of utility functions taken from a fixed list of possible functions, together with a polarity (maximize or minimize) for each of them.

Note that one new utility function, namely sum(name), has been added since Misc-live 4.

Ranking of Solvers

This has changed since MISC 2010: the former two classes FAIL and ABORT have been merged into one. The updated specification of the ranking algorithm can be found here.

The execution environment

is the same as for MISC 2010. We have now made some points of the description (concerning the invocation of java, and the signal sent before the timeout) more precise. Here is the exact description.

Organization of the 2011 competition

Declaration of ParticipationAugust 1, 2011, 23h59 UT
Submission of SolversAugust 12, 2011, 23h59 UT
Announcement of ResultsSeptember 12, 2011

Special offer for early submitters: As always, participants are invited to submit early, so that we can iron out as early as possible all oddities due to the execution environment, etc. For all submissions that we receive by Friday, June 24, we offer to run the submitted solver on our infrastructure on a small selection of problems from MISC-Live #4, and to make the results of these available to the submitter.

The guidelines for submitting solvers are the same as for MISC 2010, and are repeated in detail here. Note, however, that we insist on both a one-line short description of the solver, and the URL of an existing web page describing the solver. Participants not providing either of these will not be included in the MISC run.

The organizers can be contacted by email to misc-committee@sympa.mancoosi.univ-paris-diderot.fr.

The results will be announced at the Second International Workshop on Logics for Component Configuration (LoCoCo 2011) on Septemer 12, 2011, in Perugia.

Links to important resources