[waldrews]

There are a few magical algorithms/systems which give you superpowers if you can find the right application for them. At least in the pre-LLM era, they were some of the magical tools we had, for just solving declaratively specified difficult problems without us explicitly writing code, while (unlike certain AI techniques which shall remain nameless) providing correctness guarantees and often being deterministic and stable.

Prolog and logic programming is one, together with its relative, constraint logic programming, and its relative mixed integer programming, which in turn is part of the broader linear and convex programming family.

What else should we put in that category?