I'd -- as usual -- suggest Prolog. Its elegant, easier to understand and more mature. It comes with "batteries included" if you want constraint solving over fin

I'd -- as usual -- suggest Prolog. Its elegant, easier to understand and more mature. It comes with "batteries included" if you want constraint solving over finite domains. Besides that MiniZinc is a phenomenal interface to a whole range of solvers specialised to various purposes which are more likely to get you where you want to go if you're not an expert. In the Prolog case -- for all its benefits -- the amount of "mechanical sympathy" required to make it perform well can become substantial very quickly. Finally, once you've written something in Picat, have a think about how you'd write it in some other language. I think you'll find .. for these toy problems, its easy in other languages too. After all, its a handful of lines to write Dijkstra or A* in most functional programming languages, and defining a state space for a search algorithm is essentially all you're ever doing.