[glangdale]

The latter is what scares me. I solved a 'bit twiddling' problem using Z3 and felt a little ashamed. It is reminiscent of Brewster's letter to Martin Gardner "Feeding a recreational puzzle into a computer is no more than a step above dynamiting a trout stream". It's very easy to let skills atrophy and resort to using black boxes we don't really understand (well, I speak for myself, anyhow). When Z3 or cplex or whatever tool du jour gets wedged on a problem, I am not sure I have the background in these tools to get unstuck.

[tnecniv]

With Z3, unfortunately, the issue is that we are really bad at gauging what makes for a hard SMT problem. Often, knowing that a particular problem is hard is the same as solving it! That said, you can do some really interesting things with SMT solvers if you can formulate the problem the right way.

Gurobi, CPLEX, and friends are less magical if you have enough mathematical maturity. Typically, if you are comfortable with linear algebra (a subject woefully ignored in most undergraduate curricula), you can work with them. In my experience, working with optimization engines is a two step process. First, you need to figure out how to formulate the problem in a smart way (typically this means that it's convex with constraints in a certain format), which is normally the hard part. Then you scroll through the list of available algorithms that the engine has at your disposal and pick one with properties that you like (they often have suggestions if you have no strong preference). Normally, if you can formulate the problem so it's convex, you will at least have a good shot of doing well with your optimization.

[petters]

I have a Phd in optimization and I still think Cplex and Gurobi seem magical. The devil is in the details. Open source solvers are comparatively not very good.

[tnecniv]

Oh for sure. You could go down a real rabbit hole if you had to implement that stuff yourself.