Combination pipelines

Seven named search experiments that chase score, each a pipeline rather than a single algorithm: it builds a board with one engine, then lifts or finishes it with another. Alongside them, two findings take apart the machinery the pipelines lean on. Each page records its idea, its board, and the questions it left open.

pageUpdated 2026-07-22

This group holds seven scored pipeline experiments and two findings. A pipeline builds a board with one engine, then lifts or finishes it with another; the interest is as much in the combination, the division of labour between construction, repair and an exact endgame, as in any one stage. The two findings, the beam-width study and the fluid frame, carry no score of their own: they take apart the machinery this family leans on, the beam producer for one and CLOISTER's frozen border for the other. The cards below tell the two kinds apart. Chaining engines is also what sets this group apart from the four studies that each take a single paradigm apart: the DFS study, the repair study, learning from strong boards and the hint study.

They share the engines; what differs is how each one composes and steers them: what it seeds, what it forbids, what it tears up and rebuilds. Each page's method section walks its stages in order. Several of the from-scratch builders lean on the beam producer, and two on the ALNS repair loop, engines that do not yet have their own write-ups here (see the engines page); where a pipeline does, its page says so plainly rather than pointing at a page that is not up yet.

They are ordered by what they taught, not by score. A pipeline that ended lower but explained why is worth more here than one that scraped a point and could not say how.

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