Home

This is the home page of Chris Jefferson. I am a Reader at the University of St Andrews, in the School of Computer Science.

I have a range of research interests, and am happy to take the chance to talk about any of them!

Group Theory

I work on applying A.I. techniques to solving problems in maths, particularly Group Theory. I am one of the lead developers of GAP. I'm particularly interested in better ways to solve computationally hard problem. I have a PhD student working on new ways of finding normalisers in highly intransitive groups orders of magnitude faster than any previous technique. See more details on my Group Theory Page.

Constraint Programming

I am also interested in Constraint Programming. I maintain the Minion Constraint Solver, and I work with the developers of Savile Row and Conjure, two tools which build on top of Minion (and many other solvers) to produce a high-level input language. If you want to use Minion, use Savile Row or Conjure instead, they provide a much nicer experience! One of my PhD students is working on a new local search solver Athanor, which can solve much bigger problems much better than Minion, or any other solver we are aware of. Check it out!

Using AI to create Games

I'm interested in using AI to create games. I previously wrote a game (now lost to time) for the iPhone called Combination, which was generated by AI. I am working on AI generated card games, and have a PhD student working on generating puzzles.