In 1996 Prof. Gene Freuder wrote the paper “In Pursuit of the Holy Grail” proposed that Constraint Programming was well-positioned to pursue the Holy Grail of computer science: the user simply states the problem and the computer solves it. For the last 7 years he runs a series of workshops aims to encourage and disseminate progress towards that goal.

This year workshop will be held on Sep 2. It includes a panel discussion “Have Chatbots Reached the Holy Grail?”. The answer is presumably “no, but”. Why not? What progress do they embody? How can we get closer? Neuro-symbolic, bespoke chatbots, coping with hallucinations, beyond LLMs, … ? If you would like to participate in the panel, submit a PDF containing a one-paragraph position statement – see Link