# Problem Stable Marriage

See Wikipedia. Consider two groups of men and women who must marry. Consider that each person has indicated a ranking for her/his possible spouses. The problem is to find a matching between the two groups such that the marriages are stable. A marriage between a man $m$ and a woman $w$ is stable iff:

• whenever $m$ prefers an other woman $o$ to $w$, $o$ prefers her husband to $m$
• whenever $w$ prefers an other man $o$ to $m$, $o$ prefers his wife to $w$

In 1962, David Gale and Lloyd Shapley proved that, for any equal number $n$ of men and women, it is always possible to make all marriages stable, with an algorithm running in $O(n^2)$. Nevertheless, this problem remains interesting as it shows how a nice and compact model can be written.

Marrying People. Image from freesvg.org

To build a CSP (Constraint Satisfaction Problem) model, we need first to import the library PyCSP$^3$:

from pycsp3 import *


Then, we need some data. Here, we have two arrays with the preferences of women and men. For example, wrankings[2][0] is the most preferred man by woman 2.

wrankings = cp_array([[1,2,4,3,5], [3,5,1,2,4], [5,4,2,1,3], [1,3,5,4,2], [4,2,3,5,1]])
mrankings = cp_array([[5,1,2,4,3], [4,1,3,2,5], [5,3,2,4,1], [1,5,4,3,2], [4,3,2,1,5]])


Note that we need to transform the lists of integers into more specific lists with the function cp_array() because, otherwise it is not possible to use a special object (here, an object Var) as an index of a list of integers in Python (and this is what we do later when posting some constraints). The good news is that when the data is loaded from a file (which is the usual case), all lists of integers have the specific type of list returned by cp_array(), and so, it is very rare to need to call this function explicitly.

We define a few constants.

n = len(wrankings)
Men, Women = range(n), range(n)


We start our CSP model by introducing two arrays $w$ and $h$ of $n$ variables. Although that one array would be technically sufficient to determine the marriages, introducing the two arrays will simplify our task of enforcing stability.

# x[m] is the wife of the man m
x = VarArray(size=n, dom=Women)

# y[w] is the husband of the woman w
y = VarArray(size=n, dom=Men)


We can display the structure of the array, as well as the domain of the first variable (note that all variables have the same domain).

print("Array x: ", x)
print("Array y: ", y)
print("Domain of any variable: ", x[0].dom)

Array x:  [x[0], x[1], x[2], x[3], x[4]]
Array y:  [y[0], y[1], y[2], y[3], y[4]]
Domain of any variable:  0..4


Concerning the constraints, we start by posting a constraint Channel in order to ensure that marriages are equivalent from both points of view.

satisfy(
# spouses must match
Channel(x, y)
);


Interestingly, by calling the function solve(), we can check that the problem is satisfiable (SAT). We can also display the found solution. Here, we call the function values() that collects the values assigned to a specified list of variables.

if solve() is SAT:
print("Wifes:    ", values(x))
print("Husbands: ", values(y))

Wifes:     [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]
Husbands:  [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]


On can observe that marriages are proposed, but preferences are certainly badly respected.

There is no reason for a man to have his wife changed with another woman if this woman prefers her husband to the man. We post a group of constraints Intension involving subexpressions corresponding to constraints Element.

satisfy(
# whenever m prefers an other woman o to w, o prefers her husband to m
(mrankings[m][o] >= mrankings[m][x[m]]) | (wrankings[o][y[o]] < wrankings[o][m])
for m in Men for o in Women
);


Similarly, there is no reason for a woman to have his husband changed with another man if this man prefers his wife to the woman.

satisfy(
# whenever w prefers an other man o to m, o prefers his wife to w
(wrankings[w][o] >= wrankings[w][y[w]]) | (mrankings[o][x[o]] < mrankings[o][w])
for w in Women for o in Men
);


We can run again the solver.

if solve() is SAT:
print("Wifes:    ", values(x))
print("Husbands: ", values(y))

Wifes:     [1, 0, 4, 2, 3]
Husbands:  [1, 0, 3, 4, 2]


The reader can check that the marriages are stable.

On can display the three possible solutions for this problem instance.

if solve(sols=ALL) is SAT:
for i in range(n_solutions()):
print("Solution ", i+1)
print("  Wifes:    ", values(x,sol=i))
print("  Husbands: ", values(y,sol=i))

Solution  1
Wifes:     [1, 0, 4, 2, 3]
Husbands:  [1, 0, 3, 4, 2]
Solution  2
Wifes:     [1, 2, 4, 0, 3]
Husbands:  [3, 0, 1, 4, 2]
Solution  3
Wifes:     [3, 0, 1, 2, 4]
Husbands:  [1, 2, 3, 0, 4]


Finally, we give below the model in one piece. Here the data is expected to be given by the user (in a command line).

from pycsp3 import *

wr, mr = data  # ranking by women and men
n = len(wr)
Men, Women = range(n), range(n)

# x[m] is the wife of the man m
x = VarArray(size=n, dom=Women)

# y[w] is the husband of the woman w
y = VarArray(size=n, dom=Men)

satisfy(
# spouses must match
Channel(x, y),

# whenever m prefers an other woman o to w, o prefers her husband to m
[(mr[m][o] >= mr[m][x[m]]) | (wr[o][y[o]] < wr[o][m]) for m in Men for o in Women],

# whenever w prefers an other man o to m, o prefers his wife to w
[(wr[w][o] >= wr[w][y[w]]) | (mr[o][x[o]] < mr[o][w]) for w in Women for o in Men]
)