Constraint programming (and constraint propagation) is highly underrated. For those not familiar with it yet, this is what's used under the hood by things like

Constraint programming (and constraint propagation) is highly underrated. For those not familiar with it yet, this is what's used under the hood by things like systemd: you give a bunch of constraints (ex: service A before service B, service B before service D but after service C, etc) and you get a solution (or none, but that's another story: when there are no solution, you can try to relax some constraints) If you want to learn more, I suggest playing with Z3 from Microsoft Research: a nice tutorial is https://ericpony.github.io/z3py-tutorial/guide-examples.htm https://ericpony.github.io/z3py-tutorial/guide-examples.htm