A glimpse of constraint satisfaction

Constraint satisfaction has become an important field in computer science. This technology is embedded in millions of pounds of software used by major companies. Many researchers or software engineers in the industry could ha ve benefited from using constraint technology without realizing it. The aim of this paper is to promote constraint technology by providing readers wit h a fairly quick introduction to this field. The approach here is to use th e well known 8-queens problem to illustrate the basic techniques in constra int satisfaction (without going into great details), and leave interested r eaders with pointers to further study this field.