Boolean satisfiability (SAT) is NP-complete. No known algorithm for SAT is of polynomial time complexity. Yet, many of the SAT instances generated as a means of solving real-world electronic design automation problems are simple enough, structurally, that modern solvers can decide them efficiently. Consequently, SAT solvers are widely used in industry for logic verification. The most robust solver algorithms are poorly understood and only vaguely described in the literature of the field. We refine these algorithms, and present them clearly. We introduce several new techniques for Boolean constraint propagation that substantially improve solver efficiency. We explain why literal count decision strategies succeed, and on that basis, we introduce a new decision strategy that outperforms the state of the art. The culmination of this work is the most powerful SAT solver publically available.

Abstract. The choice of the variable to flip in the Walksat family procedures is always random in that it is selected from a randomly chosen unsatisfied clause c. This choice in Novelty or R-Novelty heuristics also contains some determinism in that the variable to flip is always limited to the two best variables in c. Inthis paper, we first propose a diversification parameter for Novelty (or R-Novelty) heuristic to break the determinism in Novelty and show its performance compared with the random walk parameter in Novelty+. Then we exploit promising decreasing paths in a deterministic fashion in local search using a gradient-based approach. In other words, when promising decreasing paths exist, the variable to flip is no longer selected from a randomly chosen unsatisfied clause but in a deterministic fashion to surely decrease the number of unsatisfied clauses. Experimental results show that the proposed diversification and the determinism allow to significantly improve Novelty (and Walksat). 1

Propositional Satisfiability (SAT) and Constraint Programming (CP) have developed as two relatively independent threads of research, cross-fertilising occasionally. These two approaches to problem solving have a lot in common, as evidenced by similar ideas underlying the branch and prune algorithms that are most successful at solving both kinds of problems. They also exhibit differences in the way they are used to state and solve problems, since SAT’s approach is in general a black-box approach, while CP aims at being tunable and programmable. This survey overviews the two areas in a comparative way, emphasising the similarities and differences between the two and the points where we feel that one technology can benefit from ideas or experience acquired

SAT Competition 2002 held in March--May 2002 in conjunction with SAT 2002 (the Fifth International Symposium on the Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing). About 30 solvers and 2300 benchmarks took part in the competition, which required more than 2 CPU years to complete the evaluation. In this report

Algorithms based on following local gradient information are surprisingly effective for certain classes of constraint satisfaction problems. Unfortunately, previous local search algorithms are notoriously incomplete: They are not guaranteed to find a feasible solution if one exists and they cannot be used to determine unsatisfiability. We present an algorithmic framework for complete local search and discuss in detail an instantiation for the propositional satisfiability problem (SAT). The fundamental idea is to use constraint learning in combination with a novel objective function that converges during search to a surface without local minima. Although the algorithm has worst-case exponential space complexity, we present empirical results on challenging SAT competition benchmarks that suggest that our implementation can perform as well as state-of-the-art solvers based on more mature techniques. Our framework suggests a range of possible algorithms lying between tree-based search and local search.

We present GrADSAT, a parallel satisfiability solver aimed at solving hard SAT instances using a large number of widely distributed commodity computational resources. The GrADSAT parallel algorithm uses intelligent backtracking, sharing of learned clauses and clause reduction. The distributed implementation allows for dynamic resource acquisition. We show how the large number of computational resources and communication overhead influence the implementation strategy. GrADSAT is compared against the best sequential solver using a wide variety of problem instances. The results show that GrADSAT delivers speed-up on most instances. Furthermore it is capable of solving problem instance which were never solved before.

Abstract. In 1997 we presented ten challenges for research on satisfiability testing [1]. In this paper we review recent progress towards each of these challenges, including our own work on the power of clause learning and randomized restart policies. 1

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The past few years have seen an enormous progress in the performance of Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solvers. Despite the worst-case exponential run time of all known algorithms, satisfiability solvers are increasingly leaving their mark as a generalpurpose tool in areas as diverse as software and hardware verification [29–31, 228], automatic test pattern generation [138, 221], planning [129, 197], scheduling [103], and even challenging problems from algebra [238]. Annual SAT competitions have led to the development of dozens of clever implementations of such solvers [e.g. 13,

We say that an algorithm for nearest neighbor search is combinatorial if only direct comparisons between two pairwise similarity values are allowed. Combinatorial algorithms for nearest neighbor search have two important advantages: (1) they do not map similarity values to artificial distance values and do not use the triangle inequality for the latter, and (2) they work for arbitrarily complicated data representations and similarity functions. In this paper we introduce a special property of the similarity function on a set S that leads to efficient combinatorial algorithms for S. The disorder constant D(S) of a set S is defined to ensure the following inequality: if x is the a’th most similar object to z and y is the b’th most similar object to z, then x is among the D(S) · (a + b) most similar objects to y. Assuming that disorder is small we present the first two known combinatorial algorithms for nearest neighbors whose query time has logarithmic dependence on the size of S. The first one, called Ranwalk, is a randomized zero-error algorithm that always returns the exact nearest neighbor. It uses space quadratic in the input size in preprocessing, but is very efficient in query processing. The second algorithm, called Arwalk, uses near-linear space. It uses random choices in preprocessing, but the query processing is essentially deterministic. For an arbitrary query q, there is only a small probability that the chosen data structure does not support q. Finally, we show that for the Reuters corpus average disorder is indeed quite small and that Ranwalk efficiently computes the nearest neighbor in most cases.