Towards Generic Explanations for Pen and Paper Puzzles with MUSes

Espasa, J., Gent, I. P., Hoffmann, R., Jefferson, C., McIlree, M. and Lynch, A. M. (2021) Towards Generic Explanations for Pen and Paper Puzzles with MUSes. In: SICSA eXplainable Artifical Intelligence Workshop 2021, Aberdeen, United Kingdom, 1 June 2021, pp. 56-63.

Abstract

Pen and paper puzzles like Sudoku, Futoshiki and Star Battle are hugely popular. Solving such puzzles can be a trivial task for modern AI systems. However, most AI systems solve problems using a form of backtracking, while people try to avoid backtracking as much as possible. This means that existing AI systems do not output explanations about their reasoning that are meaningful to people. We present Demystify, a tool which allows puzzles to be expressed in a high-level constraint programming language and uses MUSes to allow us to produce descriptions of steps in the puzzle solving. We give several improvements to the existing techniques for solving puzzles with MUSes, which allow us to solve a range of significantly more complex puzzles and give higher quality explanations. We demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of Demystify by comparing its results to documented strategies for solvinga range of pen and paper puzzles by hand, showing that our technique can find many of the same explanations.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Additional Information: This research was supported by the Royal Society URF\R\180015.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: McIlree, Matthew
• Authors: Espasa, J., Gent, I. P., Hoffmann, R., Jefferson, C., McIlree, M., and Lynch, A. M.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• ISSN: 1613-0073
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors
• First Published: First published in Proceedings of the SICSA eXplainable Artifical Intelligence Workshop 2021 2894:56-63
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons license