MiniZinc 2.5.0 COIN Defaults

[klindek]

Getting these error messages based on options for the COIN solver. I created a new project just in case it was my project settings causing the issues. Upgraded from Previous MiniZinc, win64, Windows 10.

With Solver Statistics Enabled:
minizinc: Unrecognized option or bad format `--solving-statistics'

N>2 (although parallel COIN has never worked as far as I know)
minizinc: Unrecognized option or bad format `--parallel'

[klindek]

Sorry, should be "COIN Options" not "COIN Defaults"

The defaults are fine.

[cyderize]

Yes, it appears that the IDE is using an invalid option when choosing solving statistics. I'll fix this in the next patch release.

[klindek]

Is there a short term solution? I use the stats to see when I've really screwed things up.

[cyderize]

You can add a custom parameter in the 'Extra configurations parameters' area with the name -s and the type Boolean set to the value true. That should pass the full statistics option.

[cyderize]

The Windows build of CBC does not include parallelism support (the problem is that MiniZinc and IDE don't know that, so the option is still there).

We may be able to get a parallel-enabled build of CBC working on Windows at some point and then that option will function correctly (although parallel CBC generally doesn't seem to perform any better than the single-threaded one, at least for the problems I've tried).

It looks like the MIP interfaces don't work with the long-form --parallel option either - they only support -p currently, so I'll fix that too.

[zayenz]

The same problem also exists for the Gecode solver. It unfortunately makes the otherwise very interesting 2.5.0 unusable for me for now, since I also depend on the statistics when developing models.

Testing the work-around by adding an extra configuration parameter, I tried

• adding --solver-statistics or -s with Boolean true (this did not output any additional statistics)
• adding --solver-statistics or -s with String and empty, errored with minizinc: Unrecognized option or bad format ''

I also tried with solver-statistics with the same problems. I also tried -s with String type and as value the string true, which gave the error minizinc: Unrecognized option or bad format 'true'. Testing with integer type and 1 gives minizinc: Unrecognized option or bad format '1'.

At first, I added a parameter and entered -s into the Value field since that is where focus was, and I did not really see that there was a field below Parameter. This gave the error minizinc: Unrecognized option or bad format '--'. I got a similar error when trying with just s: minizinc: Unrecognized option or bad format '--s'.

An UI additional note is that when selecting a Boolean option, the dropdown shows False and True, while when selected it shows as false and true.

[cyderize]

Yes, there seems to be a bug with the IDE not displaying the statistics output correctly. Looks like there's going to a be a patch release rather soon.