A pioneering look at the fundamental role of logic in optimization and constraint satisfaction

While recent efforts to combine optimization and constraint satisfaction have received considerable attention, little has been said about using logic in optimization as the key to unifying the two fields. Logic-Based Methods for Optimization develops for the first time a comprehensive conceptual framework for integrating optimization and constraint satisfaction, then goes a step further and shows how extending logical inference to optimization allows for more powerful as well as flexible modeling and solution techniques. Designed to be easily accessible to industry professionals and academics in both operations research and artificial intelligence, the book provides a wealth of examples as well as elegant techniques and modeling frameworks ready for implementation. Timely, original, and thought-provoking, Logic-Based Methods for Optimization:

• Demonstrates the advantages of combining the techniques in problem solving
• Offers tutorials in constraint satisfaction/constraint programming and logical inference
• Clearly explains such concepts as relaxation, cutting planes, nonserial dynamic programming, and Bender’s decomposition
• Reviews the necessary technologies for software developers seeking to combine the two techniques
• Features extensive references to important computational studies
• And much more

In what is probably the fullest and most vivid extant account of the American Colonial frontier, "The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution" gives shape to the daily life, thoughts, hopes, and fears of the frontier people. It is set forth by one of the most extraordinary men who ever sought out the wilderness--Charles Woodmason, an Anglican minister whose moral earnestness and savage indignation, combined with a vehement style, make him worthy of comparison with Swift. The book consists of his journal, selections from the sermons he preached to his Backcountry congregations, and the letters he wrote to influential people in Charleston and England describing life on the frontier and arguing the cause of the frontier people. Woodmason's pleas are fervent and moving; his narrative and descriptive style is colorful to a degree attained by few writers in Colonial America.

Harriott Pinckney Horry began her receipt book more than two hundred years ago. It is being published now for the first time. You will get a lively sense of what colonial plantation life was like from reading Harriott's receipt book. She began it in 1770, shortly after she was married, writing recipes and household information in a notebook. Her recipes reflect both English and French culinary traditions. You will recognize in the recipes the origins of some of your contemporary favorites. Harriott writes also about keeping the dairy and smokehouse, how to dye clothes, what to do about insects, how to care for trees and crops, and how to make soap, all skills she learned in the course of managing the plantation after her husband's early death. From Harriott's writing and Hooker's knowledgeable introduction and editorial notes, you will learn what it was like to be well-to-do and a member of Southern aristocracy, living in a world of rice and indigo planters, merchants, lawyers, and politicians--the colonial elite. Because knowing about food preferences and eating habits of any people expands our understanding of their nature and times, the receipt book of Harriott Pinckney Horry opens another window on the history of colonial plantations.