FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Mary Kroening +1-828-350-0350
March 23, 1996 - Stow, MA-The 1997 Atlantic Coast Conference basketball season schedule was created using Amzi! Prolog. This is the first time the ACC has used rule-based technology. They turned to it because they couldn't get a schedule anywhere else that met their constraints for television, balance and fairness.
Fred Barakat, Assistant Commissioner of the ACC said, "Amzi! is the only organization that was able to give us a complete schedule that met all our requirements and scheduling constraints."
The ACC has some extremely demanding constraints on their regular season schedule. In addition to the normal pattern of each team having to play each other team twice, once home and once away, there are additional constraints based on TV coverage, teams which must play on certain days and a desire by the highly competitive coaches of Duke, North Carolina, Wake Forest, et al. to have a schedule that is fair to all teams.
The fairness constraints are the most difficult to enforce, as they require teams to have equal home and away games during each half season, not have more than two home or away games in a row, and have an equal number of their home games on weekends as during the mid-week.
The problem had become too complex for hand scheduling as well as other computer-based methods, so this year the ACC schedule was generated using a Prolog program written in Amzi!. It meets all of the constraints, leaving the commissioner happy, the coaches happy, and the TV schedulers happy.
Amzi! Prolog is an ideal language for implementing solutions to scheduling and planning problems because of its powerful, built-in pattern matching and searching. Prolog is an industry-standard language available on many different platforms. The Amzi! implementation specializes in allowing Prolog modules to be embedded in conventional applications written in languages such as C/C++, Visual Basic, and Delphi; and in tools such as Web Servers, Access and Excel. Amzi! Prolog + Logic Server, version 3.3, is available in Personal and Professional Editions from $298 to $598.
More information and a ready-to-run scheduling demo (based on the ACC program) with source code is available on Amzi!'s web site at http://www.amzi.com
Amzi! and Logic Server are trademarks of Amzi! inc.
Amzi! inc.
47 Redwood Road
Asheville, NC 28804 U.S.A.
+1-828-350-0350
www.amzi.com