6.8 KiB
Exam committees
Introduction
At the Department of Informatics (University of Oslo), all exams are corrected by a committee consisting of two examiners. For large courses, there are often many examiners where some wants to correct more than others. The administration is responsible for forming these committees. Sometimes there are additional constraints on what examiners can form a committee (the typical example being that two examiners are professors and two are master students).
Before digitizing exams at the department, the administration would have physical copies of the exam to distribute. This would actually make it easier to form the committees, because the constraints could be handled on the fly. When digitized, the problem would essentially turn into a math problem which is not particularly easy to solve.
This is an actual email (in Norwegian) forwarded to me from someone in the administration:
Mine mattekunnskaper er tydeligvis fraværende. Jeg klarer ikke finne en fornuftig løsning på dette:
A: 158 B: 150 C: 108 D: 60 E: 60 F: 15 Det er snakk om sensur i inf1300 med 566 besvarelser. D og E kan ikke rette mot hverandre. De bør helst rette mot B eller C.
Har du et bra forslag til meg? Jeg blir GAL. Det var bedre før, da jeg hadde besvarelsene fysisk å kunne telle ark.
Har du mulighet til å hjelpe en stakkar?
Takk
Being programmers who have recently heard of this thing called SMT-solving, we happily research the subject in trying to find a general solution to this cry for help.
Satisfiability modulo theories (SMT)
Satisfiability refers to solving satisfiability problems, i.e. given a first order logical formula $\phi$, decide whether or not there exists a model $\mathcal{M}$ such that $\mathcal{M} \models \phi$. In general, this is an undecidable problem. However, there are theories within first order logic that are decidable. SMT solvers can produce models that satisfy a set of formulas for many useful theories.
The solver we will be using is Z3.
Theories
Example of theories can be the theory of booleans (or propositional logic), integers or real numbers with equations and inequations, or other common programming concepts like arrays or bitvectors. Z3 supports solving constraint problems in such theories. More formally, we define theories as follows:
A theory is a set of first order logic formulas, closed under implication.
We can imagine how this might work. The natural numbers can, for instance, be expressed with the Peano axioms.
- $\forall x \in \mathbb{N} \ (0 \neq S ( x ))$
- $\forall x, y \in \mathbb{N} \ (S( x ) = S( y ) \Rightarrow x = y)$
- $\forall x \in \mathbb{N} \ (x + 0 = x )$
- $\forall x, y \in \mathbb{N} \ (x + S( y ) = S( x + y ))$
- $\forall x \in \mathbb{N} \ (x \cdot 0 = 0)$
- $\forall x, y \in \mathbb{N} \ (x \cdot S ( y ) = x \cdot y + x )$
In addition, one axiom is added to formalize induction. Because a theory is closed under implication, the theory consists of all true first-order propositions about natural numbers.
However, in Z3, we don't see such axioms; they just provide the formal justification for implementing special solvers for problem domains like natural numbers other commonly used theories. In z3, we could write something like this:
(declare-const a Int)
(declare-const b Int)
(declare-const c Int)
(assert (< 0 a b c))
(assert (= (+ (* a a) (* b b)) (* c c)))
(check-sat)
(get-model)This encodes two constraints
- $\phi_1 = 0 < a < b < c$
- $\phi_2 = a^2 + b^2 = c^2$
where $a,b,c$ are whole numbers. Then we ask Z3 to produce a model $\mathcal{M}$ such that $\mathcal{M} \models \phi_1 \land \phi_2$, which outputs:
sat
(model
(define-fun c () Int
5)
(define-fun b () Int
4)
(define-fun a () Int
3)
)
The first line sat indicates that the formula is satisfiable, and produce
a model where $a=3$, $b=4$ and $c=5$.
Many-sorted first order logic
Z3 implements SMT-LIB, a standardized syntax and semantics for SMT solvers. It's underlying logic is a Many-sorted first order logic, where values must have an associated sort (which is a basic form of type). A signature in a many-sorted first logic is defined as follows.
A signature $\Sigma = (S, F, P)$ consists of a countable set of
- Sorts $S$.
- Function symbols $F$, where each member is a function symbol $f$ with an associated type $s_1 \times \dots \times s_n \to s$, where $s \in S$ and $s_1, \dots, s_n \in S$. Constants are simply zero-arity function symbols.
- Predicate symbols $P$, where each predicate has an associated type $s_1 \times \dots \times s_n$. We assume an equality $=_s$ predicate with type $s \times s$ for all sorts in $S$.
The equality relation will be denoted $=$, letting the sort remain implicit.
For example, the signature for the integers can be formalized as $\Sigma_{int} = (S_{Int}, F_{Int}, P_{Int})$ where
- $S_{Int} = \{Int\}$
-
$F_{Int} = \{0, 1, +, -, *\}$ where
- $0 : \to Int$
- $1 : \to Int$
- $+ : Int \times Int \to Int$
- $- : Int \times Int \to Int$
- $* : Int \times Int \to Int$
-
$P_{Int} = \{<, =\}$ where
- $< : Int \times Int$
- $= : Int \times Int$
Back to the problem
We have 283 exams. Every exam must be corrected by a committee consisting of two examiners. Each examiner has an associated capacity of exams they want to correct. Examiners D and E can't be in the same committee, and should rather be in committee with B or C. We prefer a smaller number of committees.
from z3 import *
exams = 283
examiners = 'ABCDEF'
capacities = [158, 150, 108, 60, 60, 15]
n = len(examiners)
s = Optimize()
committees = [Int('%s x %s' % (a, b))
for a in examiners
for b in examiners]
# Make sure we can correct all exams
# Note we count all committees twice 🤷♀️
allcorrected = [2*exams == sum(committees)/2]
# No one can correct with themselves (using triangular numbers!)
distinct = [committees[(i*(i+1))//2] == 0 for i in range(n)]
# Respect the capacities
# respectcapacities =
s.add(allcorrected + distinct)
s.check()
print(s.model())