Boolean satisfiability problems are an important benchmark for questions
about complexity, algorithms, heuristics and threshold phenomena. Recent work
on heuristics, and the satisfiability threshold has centered around the
structure and connectivity of the solution space. Motivated by this work, we
study structural and connectivity-related properties of the space of solutions
of Boolean satisfiability problems and establish various dichotomies in
Schaefer's framework.
On the structural side, we obtain dichotomies for the kinds of subgraphs of
the hypercube that can be induced by the solutions of Boolean formulas, as well
as for the diameter of the connected components of the solution space. On the
computational side, we establish dichotomy theorems for the complexity of the
connectivity and st-connectivity questions for the graph of solutions of
Boolean formulas. Our results assert that the intractable side of the
computational dichotomies is PSPACE-complete, while the tractable side - which
includes but is not limited to all problems with polynomial time algorithms for
satisfiability - is in P for the st-connectivity question, and in coNP for the
connectivity question. The diameter of components can be exponential for the
PSPACE-complete cases, whereas in all other cases it is linear; thus, small
diameter and tractability of the connectivity problems are remarkably aligned.
The crux of our results is an expressibility theorem showing that in the
tractable cases, the subgraphs induced by the solution space possess certain
good structural properties, whereas in the intractable cases, the subgraphs can
be arbitrary
