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Creating Problems:

Building a problem yourself should be straightforward - just make sure that you're in "Create" mode. To create nodes, click on the "Create Variable" button, then click on the white canvas to bring up a dialog box where you can specify all the variable information. Creating constraints is just as easy. You can also load a ready made sample CSP from the many available. Just click on Load Sample CSP from the "File" menu and select one to load. Check the extended help if you're having problems, or if you don't understand what the terminology means.

Solving Problems:

When in "Solve" mode, there are many ways to perform the arc-consistency algorithm:

• Select blue arcs you want to process simply by clicking on them.
  
• Step or Fine Step through arc-consistency using the "Step" or "Fine Step" button, letting the program automatically pick arcs on the queue and make them consistent.
  
• Let the program do all the work by clicking "Auto Arc-Consistency". You can adjust the speed of Auto Arc-Consistency by checking one of the checkboxes in the "Arc-Consistency Speed" submenu under the "CSP Options" menu.
• Let the program find solutions one at a time using the "AutoSolve" button. AutoSolving recursively makes the CSP arc-consistent and splits domains if necessary until a solution is found.

To perform domain splitting, click on any variable. This will bring up a dialog box where you can specify which domain elements you want to keep. Once you've split a domain, you can perform arc-consistency on the smaller problem. At any time, you can get the "other half" of the split domain by clicking on the "Backtrack" button.