  Constructing a minimal vertex cover of a graph can be seen as a prototype for
a combinatorial optimization problem under hard constraints. In this paper, we
develop and analyze message passing techniques, namely warning and survey
propagation, which serve as efficient heuristic algorithms for solving these
computational hard problems. We show also, how previously obtained results on
the typical-case behavior of vertex covers of random graphs can be recovered
starting from the message passing equations, and how they can be extended.
