 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Solver" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(September 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Asolver is a piece ofmathematical software, possibly in the form of a stand-alonecomputer program or as asoftware library, that 'solves' a mathematical problem. A solver takes problem descriptions in some sort of generic form and calculates their solution. In a solver, the emphasis is on creating a program or library that can easily be applied to other problems of similar type.
Types of problems with existing dedicated solvers include:
TheGeneral Problem Solver (GPS) is a particular computer program created in 1957 byHerbert Simon,J. C. Shaw, andAllen Newell intended to work as a universal problem solver, that theoretically can be used to solve every possible problem that can be formalized in a symbolic system, given the right input configuration. It was the first computer program that separated its knowledge of problems (in the form ofdomain rules) from its strategy of how to solve problems (as a general searchengine).
General solvers typically use an architecture similar to the GPS to decouple a problem's definition from the strategy used to solve it. The advantage in this decoupling is that the solver does not depend on the details of any particular problem instance. The strategy utilized by general solvers was based on a general algorithm (generally based onbacktracking) with the only goal of completeness. This induces an exponentialcomputational time that dramatically limits their usability. Modern solvers use a more specialized approach that takes advantage of the structure of the problems so that the solver spends as little time as possible backtracking.
For problems of a particular class (e.g., systems ofnon-linear equations) multiple algorithms are usually available. Some solvers implement multiple algorithms.