A Gentle Introduction to NUMERICA

NUMERICA is a modeling language for stating and solving global optimization problems. It makes it possible to express these problems in a notation close to the way these problems are stated in textbooks or scientific papers. In addition, the constraint-solving algorithm of NUMERICA, which combines techniques from numerical analysis and artificial intelligence, provides many guarantees about correctness, convergence, and completeness. This paper is a gentle introduction to NUMERICA. It highlights some of the main difficulties of global optimization and illustrates the functionality of NUMERIC A by contrasting it to traditional methods. It also presents the essence of the constraint-solving algorithm of NUMERICA in a novel, high-level, way.