Dead-end Elimination - Basic Requirements

Basic Requirements

An effective DEE implementation requires four pieces of information:

1. A well-defined finite set of discrete independent variables
2. A precomputed numerical value (considered the "energy") associated with each element in the set of variables (and possibly with their pairs, triples, etc.)
3. A criterion or criteria for determining when an element is a "dead end", that is, when it cannot possibly be a member of the solution set
4. An objective function (considered the "energy function") to be minimized

Note that the criteria can easily be reversed to identify the maximum of a given function as well.