clingo VS highfleet-ship-opt

One of the easiest to get started on Datalog in my opinion is really clingo https://potassco.org/clingo/ , which can be pip installed and has python bindings. Answer Set Programming goes beyond datalog, but it holds datalog semantics as a sublanguage. It is unfortunate this is not well advertised.

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Love this article and the push to build awareness of what modern SAT solvers can do.

The thing it misses, though, is that there are higher level abstractions that are far more accessible than SAT. If I were teaching a course on this, I would start with either Answer Set Programming or Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT). The most widely used solvers for those are clingo [0] and Z3 [1]:

With ASP, you write in a much clearer Prolog-like syntax that does not require nearly as much encoding effort as your typical SAT problem. Z3 is similar -- you can code up problems in a simple Python API, or write them in the smtlib language.

Both of these make it easy to add various types of optimization, constraints, etc. to your problem, and they're much better as modeling languages than straight SAT. Underneath, they have solvers that leverage all the modern CDCL tricks.

We wrote up a paper [2] on how to formulate a modern dependency solver in ASP; it's helped tremendously for adding new types of features like options, variants, and complex compiler/arch dependencies to Spack [3]. You could not get good solutions to some of these problems without a capable and expressive solver.

[0] https://github.com/potassco/clingo

Answer Set Programming is an incredibly powerful tool to declaratively solve combinatorial problems. Clingo is one of the best open source implementations in my opinion: https://github.com/potassco/clingo

This is my favorite pastime as well! Well done. I've also dipped my toes in the "over engineer a game" with:

A highfleet ship optimizer which chooses optimal module sets using ILP at

https://hfopt.jodavaho.io

And a hunt showdown loadout A/B test package that lets you run stats queries on your game journal at (for now)

https://crates.io/crates/kda-tools

If you play "Highfleet" at all, can you poke around https://hfopt.jodavaho.io and see if you can get it to generate module lists that make sense?

It's an optimizer, just add what you know you want, set some cost / range / speed limits, and it will output the cheapest version of the ship that includes all required modules and has all requested stats.

I used a MILP solver to optimize my ship loadouts in Highfleet. It's rugged-looking, but works great. https://hfopt.jodavaho.io

If you are a bit more techy, a working python version is available here: https://github.com/jodavaho/highfleet-ship-opt