[jpnelson]

I did some work with this a while ago to try and use MiniZinc to calculate genome edit distances, which was quite interesting: https://github.com/jpnelson/genome-edit

The hardest part is certainly making constraints that don't have any holes in them, and then making it fast. Making the MiniZinc solver faster than a search algorithm required a bit of knowledge about how the solver works.

I can imagine there are some problems that are well suited to this, and this would be a good tool to solve them, but it's certainly not the best way to solve every problem (yet, anyway).