Design, implementation and evaluation of a distributed CDCL framework

The primary subject of this dissertation is practically solving instances of the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) that arise from industrial applications. The invention of the conflict-driven clause-learning (CDCL) algorithm led to enormous progress in this field. CDCL has been augmented with effective pre- and inprocessing techniques that boost its effectiveness. While a considerable amount of work has been done on applying shared-memory parallelism to enhance the performance of CDCL, solving SAT on distributed architectures is studied less thoroughly. In this work, we develop a distributed, CDCL-based framework for SAT solving. This framework consists of three main components: 1. An implementation of the CDCL algorithm that we have written from scratch, 2. a novel, parallel SAT algorithm that builds upon this CDCL implementation and 3. a collection of parallel simplification techniques for SAT instances. We call our resulting framework satUZK; our parallel solving algorithm is called the distributed divide-and-conquer (DDC) algorithm. The DDC algorithm employs a parallel lookahead procedure to dynamically partition the search space. Load balancing is used to ensure that all computational resources are utilized during lookahead. This procedure results in a divide-and-conquer tree that is distributed over all processors. Individual threads are routed through this tree until they arrive at unsolved leaf vertices. Upon arrival, the lookahead procedure is invoked again or the leaf vertex is solved via CDCL. Several extensions to the DDC algorithm are proposed. These include clause sharing and a scheme to locally adjust the LBD score relative to the current search tree vertex. LBD is a measure for the usefulness of clauses that participate in a CDCL search. We evaluate our DDC algorithm empirically and benchmark it against the best distributed SAT algorithms. In this experiment, our DDC algorithm is faster than other distributed, state-of-the-art solvers and solves at least as many instances. In addition to running a parallel algorithm for SAT solving we also consider parallel simplifcation. Here, we first develop a theoretical foundation that allows us to prove the correctness of parallel simplification techniques. Using this as a basis, we examine established simplification algorithms for their parallelizability. It turns out that several well-known simplification techniques can be parallelized efficiently. We provide parallel implementation of the techniques and test their effectiveness in empirical experiments. This evaluation finds several combinations of simplification techniques that can solve instances which could not be solved by the DDC algorithm alone

On the complexity of resolution-based proof systems

Propositional Proof Complexity is the area of Computational Complexity that studies the length of proofs in propositional logic. One of its main questions is to determine which particular propositional formulas have short proofs in a given propositional proof system. In this thesis we present several results related to this question, all on proof systems that are extensions of the well-known resolution proof system. The first result of this thesis is that TQBF, the problem of determining if a fully-quantified propositional CNF-formula is true, is PSPACE-complete even when restricted to instances of bounded tree-width, i.e. a parameter of structures that measures their similarity to a tree. Instances of bounded tree-width of many NP-complete problems are tractable, e.g. SAT, the boolean satisfiability problem. We show that this does not scale up to TQBF. We also consider Q-resolution, a quantifier-aware version of resolution. On the negative side, our first result implies that, unless NP = PSPACE, the class of fully-quantified CNF-formulas of bounded tree-width does not have short proofs in any proof system (and in particular in Q-resolution). On the positive side, we show that instances with bounded respectful tree-width, a more restrictive condition, do have short proofs in Q-resolution. We also give a natural family of formulas with this property that have real-world applications. The second result concerns interpretability. Informally, we say that a first-order formula can be interpreted in another if the first one can be expressed using the vocabulary of the second, plus some extra features. We show that first-order formulas whose propositional translations have short R(const)-proofs, i.e. a generalized version of resolution with DNF-formulas of constant-size terms, are closed under a weaker form of interpretability (that with no extra features), called definability. Our main result is a similar result on interpretability. Also, we show some examples of interpretations and show a systematic technique to transform some Sigma_1-definitions into quantifier-free interpretations. The third and final result is about a relativized weak pigeonhole principle. This says that if at least 2n out of n^2 pigeons decide to fly into n holes, then some hole must be doubly occupied. We prove that the CNF encoding of this principle does not have polynomial-size DNF-refutations, i.e. refutations in the generalized version of resolution with unbounded DNF-formulas. For this proof we discuss the existence of unbalanced low-degree bipartite expanders satisfying a certain robustness condition

On modal expansions of t-norm based logics with rational constants

[eng] According to Zadeh, the term “fuzzy logic” has two different meanings: wide and narrow. In a narrow sense it is a logical system which aims a formalization of approximate reasoning, and so it can be considered an extension of many-valued logic. However, Zadeh also says that the agenda of fuzzy logic is quite different from that of traditional many-valued logic, as it addresses concepts like linguistic variable, fuzzy if-then rule, linguistic quantifiers etc. Hájek, in the preface of his foundational book Metamathematics of Fuzzy Logic, agrees with Zadeh’s distinction, but stressing that formal calculi of many-valued logics are the kernel of the so-called Basic Fuzzy logic (BL), having continuous triangular norms (t-norm) and their residua as semantics for the conjunction and implication respectively, and of its most prominent extensions, namely Lukasiewicz, Gödel and Product fuzzy logics. Taking advantage of the fact that a t-norm has residuum if, and only if, it is left-continuous, the logic of the left-continuous t-norms, called MTL, was soon after introduced. On the other hand, classical modal logic is an active field of mathematical logic, originally introduced at the beginning of the XXth century for philosophical purposes, that more recently has shown to be very successful in many other areas, specially in computer science. That are the most well-known semantics for classical modal logics. Modal expansions of non-classical logics, in particular of many-valued logics, have also been studied in the literature. In this thesis we focus on the study of some modal logics over MTL, using natural generalizations of the classical Kripke relational structures where propositions at possible words can be many-valued, but keeping classical accessibility relations. In more detail, the main goal of this thesis has been to study modal expansions of the logic of a left-continuous t-norm, defined over the language of MTL expanded with rational truth-constants and the Monteiro-Baaz Delta-operator, whose intended (standard) semantics is given by Kripke models with crisp accessibility relations and taking the unit real interval [0, 1] as set of truth-values. To get complete axiomatizations, already known techniques based on the canonical model construction are uses, but this requires to ensure that the underlying (propositional) fuzzy logic is strongly standard complete. This constraint leads us to consider axiomatic systems with infinitary inference rules, already at the propositional level. A second goal of the thesis has been to also develop and automated reasoning software tool to solve satisfiability and logical consequence problems for some of the fuzzy logic modal logics considered. This dissertation is structured in four parts. After a gentle introduction, Part I contains the needed preliminaries for the thesis be as self-contained as possible. Most of the theoretical results are developed in Parts II and III. Part II focuses on solving some problems concerning the strong standard completeness of underlying non-modal expansions. We first present and axiomatic system for the non-nodal propositional logic of a left-continuous t-norm who makes use of a unique infinitary inference rule, the “density rule”, that solves several problems pointed out in the literature. We further expand this axiomatic system in order to also characterize arbitrary operations over [0, 1] satisfying certain regularity conditions. However, since this axiomatic system turn out to be not well-behaved for the modal expansion, we search for alternative axiomatizations with some particular kind of inference rules (that will be called conjunctive). Unfortunately, this kind of axiomatization does not necessarily exist for all left-continuous t-norms (in particular, it does not exist for the Gödel logic case), but we identify a wide class of t-norms for which it works. This “well-behaved” t-norms include all ordinal sums of Lukasiewiczand Product t-norms. Part III focuses on the modal expansion of the logics presented before. We propose axiomatic systems (which are, as expected, modal expansions of the ones given in the previous part) respectively strongly complete with respect to local and global Kripke semantics defined over frames with crisp accessibility relations and worlds evaluated over a “well-behaved” left-continuous t-norm. We also study some properties and extensions of these logics and also show how to use it for axiomatizing the possibilistic logic over the very same t-norm. Later on, we characterize the algebraic companion of these modal logics, provide some algebraic completeness results and study the relation between their Kripke and algebraic semantics. Finally, Part IV of the thesis is devoted to a software application, mNiB-LoS, who uses Satisfability Modulo Theories in order to build an automated reasoning system to reason over modal logics evaluated over BL algebras. The acronym of this applications stands for a modal Nice BL-logics Solver. The use of BL logics along this part is motivated by the fact that continuous t-norms can be represented as ordinal sums of three particular t-norms: Gödel, Lukasiewicz and Product ones. It is then possible to show that these t-norms have alternative characterizations that, although equivalent from the point of view of the logic, have strong differences for what concerns the design, implementation and efficiency of the application. For practical reasons, the modal structures included in the solver are limited to the finite ones (with no bound on the cardinality)

Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning

These are the proceedings of the 11th Nonmonotonic Reasoning Workshop. The aim of this series is to bring together active researchers in the broad area of nonmonotonic reasoning, including belief revision, reasoning about actions, planning, logic programming, argumentation, causality, probabilistic and possibilistic approaches to KR, and other related topics. As part of the program of the 11th workshop, we have assessed the status of the field and discussed issues such as: Significant recent achievements in the theory and automation of NMR; Critical short and long term goals for NMR; Emerging new research directions in NMR; Practical applications of NMR; Significance of NMR to knowledge representation and AI in general