Constraint Satisfaction Problems: A Survey for Anoma

This paper serves as a broad introduction to Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) tailored for professionals working on Anoma, a decentralized financial framework. Our primary aim is to build a robust intuition for CSPs, preparing the Anoma community for its application in optimizing intents—defined as desires for future states of the financial system. We explore a wide array of CSP examples, including but not limited to Boolean Satisfiability and Integer Linear Programming, to equip readers with a general understanding of the field. We also include an overview of CSP tractability, aiming to give the reader an understanding of the limitations of solvability. A unique emphasis is placed on compositional methods, facilitating distributed problem-solving across multiple agents. Towards the end, we formalize the notion of 'intents' within the framework of Constraint Optimization.