6,545 research outputs found
On the freezing of variables in random constraint satisfaction problems
The set of solutions of random constraint satisfaction problems (zero energy
groundstates of mean-field diluted spin glasses) undergoes several structural
phase transitions as the amount of constraints is increased. This set first
breaks down into a large number of well separated clusters. At the freezing
transition, which is in general distinct from the clustering one, some
variables (spins) take the same value in all solutions of a given cluster. In
this paper we study the critical behavior around the freezing transition, which
appears in the unfrozen phase as the divergence of the sizes of the
rearrangements induced in response to the modification of a variable. The
formalism is developed on generic constraint satisfaction problems and applied
in particular to the random satisfiability of boolean formulas and to the
coloring of random graphs. The computation is first performed in random tree
ensembles, for which we underline a connection with percolation models and with
the reconstruction problem of information theory. The validity of these results
for the original random ensembles is then discussed in the framework of the
cavity method.Comment: 32 pages, 7 figure
Structure and Problem Hardness: Goal Asymmetry and DPLL Proofs in<br> SAT-Based Planning
In Verification and in (optimal) AI Planning, a successful method is to
formulate the application as boolean satisfiability (SAT), and solve it with
state-of-the-art DPLL-based procedures. There is a lack of understanding of why
this works so well. Focussing on the Planning context, we identify a form of
problem structure concerned with the symmetrical or asymmetrical nature of the
cost of achieving the individual planning goals. We quantify this sort of
structure with a simple numeric parameter called AsymRatio, ranging between 0
and 1. We run experiments in 10 benchmark domains from the International
Planning Competitions since 2000; we show that AsymRatio is a good indicator of
SAT solver performance in 8 of these domains. We then examine carefully crafted
synthetic planning domains that allow control of the amount of structure, and
that are clean enough for a rigorous analysis of the combinatorial search
space. The domains are parameterized by size, and by the amount of structure.
The CNFs we examine are unsatisfiable, encoding one planning step less than the
length of the optimal plan. We prove upper and lower bounds on the size of the
best possible DPLL refutations, under different settings of the amount of
structure, as a function of size. We also identify the best possible sets of
branching variables (backdoors). With minimum AsymRatio, we prove exponential
lower bounds, and identify minimal backdoors of size linear in the number of
variables. With maximum AsymRatio, we identify logarithmic DPLL refutations
(and backdoors), showing a doubly exponential gap between the two structural
extreme cases. The reasons for this behavior -- the proof arguments --
illuminate the prototypical patterns of structure causing the empirical
behavior observed in the competition benchmarks
Lost in translation: Toward a formal model of multilevel, multiscale medicine
For a broad spectrum of low level cognitive regulatory and other biological phenomena, isolation from signal crosstalk between them requires more metabolic free energy than permitting correlation. This allows an evolutionary exaptation leading to dynamic global broadcasts of interacting physiological processes at multiple scales. The argument is similar to the well-studied exaptation of noise to trigger stochastic resonance amplification in physiological subsystems. Not only is the living state characterized by cognition at every scale and level of organization, but by multiple, shifting, tunable, cooperative larger scale broadcasts that link selected subsets of functional modules to address problems. This multilevel dynamical viewpoint has implications for initiatives in translational medicine that have followed the implosive collapse of pharmaceutical industry 'magic bullet' research. In short, failure to respond to the inherently multilevel, multiscale nature of human pathophysiology will doom translational medicine to a similar implosion
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