In a graph with a "small world" topology, nodes are highly clustered yet the path length between them is small. Such a topology can make search problems very difficulty since local decisions quickly propagate globally. We show that graphs associated with many different search problems have a small world topology, and that the cost of solving search problems with such a topology can have a heavy-tailed distribution.

Recently there has been a great amount of interest in Random Constraint Satisfaction Problems, both from an experimental and a theoretical point of view. Rather intruigingly, experimental results with various models for generating random CSP instances suggest a "threshold-like" behaviour and some theoretical work has been done in analyzing these models when the number of variables is asymptotic. In this paper we show that the models commonly used for generating random CSP instances suffer from a wrong parameterization which makes them unsuitable for asymptotic analysis. In particular, when the number of variables becomes large almost all instances they generate are, trivially, overconstrained. We then present a new model that is suitable for asymptotic analysis and, in the spirit of random SAT, we derive lower and upper bounds for its parameters so that the instances generated are "almost surely" over- and underconstrained, respectively. Finally, we apply the technique introduced in [19], to one of the popular models in Artificial Intelligence and derive sharper estimates for the probability of being overconstrained as a function of the number of variables. 1

SATLIB is an online resource for SAT-related research established in June 1998. Its core components, a benchmark suite of SAT instances and a collection of SAT solvers, aim to facilitate empirical research on SAT by providing a uniform test-bed for SAT solvers along with freely available implementations of high-performing SAT algorithms. In this article, we give an overview of SATLIB; in particular, we describe its current set of benchmark problems. Currently, the main SATLIB web site

Local search algorithms are among the standard methods for solving hard combinatorial problems from various areas of Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research. For SAT, some of the most successful and powerful algorithms are based on stochastic local search and in the past 10 years a large number of such algorithms have been proposed and investigated. In this article, we focus on two particularly well-known families of local search algorithms for SAT, the GSAT and WalkSAT architectures. We present a detailed comparative analysis of these algorithms' performance using a benchmark set which contains instances from randomised distributions as well as SAT-encoded problems from various domains. We also investigate the robustness of the observed performance characteristics as algorithm-dependent and problem-dependent parameters are changed. Our empirical analysis gives a very detailed picture of the algorithms' performance for various domains of SAT problems; it also reveals a fundamental weakness in some of the best-performing algorithms and shows how this can be overcome.

Abstract. Basket Analysis, which is a standard method for data mining, derives frequent itemsets from database. However, its mining ability is limited to transaction data consisting of items. In reality, there are many applications where data are described in a more structural way, e.g. chemical compounds and Web browsing history. There are a few approaches that can discover characteristic patterns from graph-structured data in the field of machine learning. However, almost all of them are not suitable for such applications that require a complete search for all frequent subgraph patterns in the data. In this paper, we propose a novel principle and its algorithm that derive the characteristic patterns which frequently appear in graphstructured data. Our algorithm can derive all frequent induced subgraphs from both directed and undirected graph structured data having loops (including self-loops) with labeled or unlabeled nodes and links. Its performance is evaluated through the applications to Web browsing pattern analysis and chemical carcinogenesis analysis.

Stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms have been successfully applied to hard combinatorial problems from different domains. Due to their inherent randomness, the run-time behaviour of these algorithms is characterised by a random variable. The detailed knowledge of the run-time distribution provides important information about the behaviour of SLS algorithms. In this paper we investigate the empirical run-time distributions for Walksat, one of the most powerful SLS algorithms for the Propositional Satisfiability Problem (SAT). Using statistical analysis techniques, we show that on hard Random-3-SAT problems, Walksat's run-time behaviour can be characterised by exponential distributions. This characterisation can be generalised to various SLS algorithms for SAT and to encoded problems from other domains. This result also has a number of consequences which are of theoretical as well as practical interest. One of these is the fact that these algorithms can be easily parallelised such that optimal speed-up is achieved for hard problem instances.

In this paper we propose a new type of random CSP model, called Model RB, which is a revision to the standard Model B. It is proved that phase transitions from a region where almost all problems are satis able to a region where almost all problems are unsatis able do exist for Model RB as the number of variables approaches in nity. Moreover, the critical values at which the phase transitions occur are also known exactly. By relating the hardness of Model RB to Model B, it is shown that there exist a lot of hard instances in Model RB.

Abstract. This paper presents a comparative study of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) for Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs). We focus on EAs where fitness is based on penalization of constraint violations and the penalties are adapted during the execution. Three different EAs based on this approach are implemented. For highly connected constraint networks, the results provide further empirical support to the theoretical prediction of the phase transition in binary CSPs. 1

We introduce an algorithm for combinatorial search on quantum computers that is capable of significantly concentrating amplitude into solutions for some NP search problems, on average. This is done by exploiting the same aspects of problem structure as used by classical backtrack methods to avoid unproductive search choices. This quantum algorithm is much more likely to find solutions than the simple direct use of quantum parallelism. Furthermore, empirical evaluation on small problems shows this quantum algorithm displays the same phase transition behavior, and at the same location, as seen in many previously studied classical search methods. Specifically, difficult problem instances are concentrated near the abrupt change from underconstrained to overconstrained problems. August

We show that nodes of high degree tend to occur infrequently in random graphs but frequently in a wide variety of graphs associated with real world search problems. We then study some alternative models for randomly generating graphs which have been proposed to give more realistic topologies. For example, we show that Watts and Strogatz 's small world model has a narrow distribution of node degree. On the other hand, Barabasi and Albert's power law model, gives graphs with both nodes of high degree and a small world topology. These graphs may therefore be useful for benchmarking. We then measure the impact of nodes of high degree and a small world topology on the cost of coloring graphs. The long tail in search costs observed with small world graphs disappears when these graphs are also constructed to contain nodes of high degree. We conjecture that this is a result of the small size of their "backbone", pairs of edges that are frozen to be the same color.