3,506 research outputs found
Generalizing Boolean Satisfiability I: Background and Survey of Existing Work
This is the first of three planned papers describing ZAP, a satisfiability
engine that substantially generalizes existing tools while retaining the
performance characteristics of modern high-performance solvers. The fundamental
idea underlying ZAP is that many problems passed to such engines contain rich
internal structure that is obscured by the Boolean representation used; our
goal is to define a representation in which this structure is apparent and can
easily be exploited to improve computational performance. This paper is a
survey of the work underlying ZAP, and discusses previous attempts to improve
the performance of the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland algorithm by exploiting
the structure of the problem being solved. We examine existing ideas including
extensions of the Boolean language to allow cardinality constraints,
pseudo-Boolean representations, symmetry, and a limited form of quantification.
While this paper is intended as a survey, our research results are contained in
the two subsequent articles, with the theoretical structure of ZAP described in
the second paper in this series, and ZAP's implementation described in the
third
The Phase Diagram of 1-in-3 Satisfiability Problem
We study the typical case properties of the 1-in-3 satisfiability problem,
the boolean satisfaction problem where a clause is satisfied by exactly one
literal, in an enlarged random ensemble parametrized by average connectivity
and probability of negation of a variable in a clause. Random 1-in-3
Satisfiability and Exact 3-Cover are special cases of this ensemble. We
interpolate between these cases from a region where satisfiability can be
typically decided for all connectivities in polynomial time to a region where
deciding satisfiability is hard, in some interval of connectivities. We derive
several rigorous results in the first region, and develop the
one-step--replica-symmetry-breaking cavity analysis in the second one. We
discuss the prediction for the transition between the almost surely satisfiable
and the almost surely unsatisfiable phase, and other structural properties of
the phase diagram, in light of cavity method results.Comment: 30 pages, 12 figure
Generalizing Boolean Satisfiability II: Theory
This is the second of three planned papers describing ZAP, a satisfiability
engine that substantially generalizes existing tools while retaining the
performance characteristics of modern high performance solvers. The fundamental
idea underlying ZAP is that many problems passed to such engines contain rich
internal structure that is obscured by the Boolean representation used; our
goal is to define a representation in which this structure is apparent and can
easily be exploited to improve computational performance. This paper presents
the theoretical basis for the ideas underlying ZAP, arguing that existing ideas
in this area exploit a single, recurring structure in that multiple database
axioms can be obtained by operating on a single axiom using a subgroup of the
group of permutations on the literals in the problem. We argue that the group
structure precisely captures the general structure at which earlier approaches
hinted, and give numerous examples of its use. We go on to extend the
Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland inference procedure to this broader setting, and
show that earlier computational improvements are either subsumed or left intact
by the new method. The third paper in this series discusses ZAPs implementation
and presents experimental performance results
An exactly solvable random satisfiability problem
We introduce a new model for the generation of random satisfiability
problems. It is an extension of the hyper-SAT model of Ricci-Tersenghi, Weigt
and Zecchina, which is a variant of the famous K-SAT model: it is extended to
q-state variables and relates to a different choice of the statistical
ensemble. The model has an exactly solvable statistic: the critical exponents
and scaling functions of the SAT/UNSAT transition are calculable at zero
temperature, with no need of replicas, also with exact finite-size corrections.
We also introduce an exact duality of the model, and show an analogy of
thermodynamic properties with the Random Energy Model of disordered spin
systems theory. Relations with Error-Correcting Codes are also discussed.Comment: 31 pages, 1 figur
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