A large class of problems in AI and other areas of computer science
can be viewed as constraint-satisfaction problems. This includes
problems in machine vision, belief maintenance, scheduling, temporal
reasoning, type reconstruction, graph theory, and satisfiability.
In general, the constraint satisfaction-problem is NP-complete, so
searching for tractable cases is an active research area. It turns
out that constraint satisfaction has an intimate connection with
database theory: constraint-satisfaction problems can be recast as
database problems and database problems can be recast as
constraint-satisfaction problems. In this talk, I will cover the
fundamentals of constraints saisfaction and describe its intimate
relationship with database theory from various perspectives.