Hot answers tagged

54 votes

Constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) vs. satisfiability modulo theory (SMT); with a coda on constraint programming

SAT, CP, SMT, (much of) ASP all deal with the same set of combinatorial optimisation problems. However, they come at these problems from different angles and with different toolboxes. These ...
40 votes

Do any quantum algorithms improve on classical SAT?

Indeed, as wwjohnsmith1 said, you can get a square root speed-up over Schöning's algorithm for 3-SAT, but also more generally for Schöning's algorithm for k-SAT. In fact, many randomized algorithms ...
31 votes

Are there any hard instances of 3-SAT when the clauses can only use literals that are "nearby" each other?

No. If the 3-SAT instance has $m$ clauses, then you can test satisfiability in $O(m 2^N)$ time. Since $N$ is a fixed constant, this is a polynomial-time algorithm that solves all instances of your ...
  • 11.1k
30 votes
Accepted

Do any quantum algorithms improve on classical SAT?

I think one can obtain a non-trivial upper bound from quantum computing by speeding up the randomized algorithms of Schöning for 3-SAT. The algorithm of Schöning runs in time $(4/3)^n$ and ...
27 votes

Theoretical explanations for practical success of SAT solvers?

I am assuming that you are referring to CDCL SAT solvers on benchmark data sets like those used in the SAT Competition. These programs are based on many heuristics and lots of optimization. There were ...
  • 21.3k
26 votes
Accepted

Is there an oracle such that SAT is not infinitely often in sub-exponential time?

You can just take the oracle A s.t. NP$^A$=EXP$^A$ since EXP is not in i.o.-subexp. For SAT$^A$ it depends on the encoding, for example if the only valid SAT instances have even length then it is easy ...
22 votes
Accepted

How is the MA version of SETH proven to be false?

You can find a preprint by following this link http://eccc.hpi-web.de/report/2016/002/ EDIT (1/24) By request, here is a quick summary, taken from the paper itself, but glossing over many things. ...
22 votes

Theoretical explanations for practical success of SAT solvers?

I am typing this quite quickly due to severe time constraints (and didn't even get to responding earlier for the same reason), but I thought I would try to at least chip in with my two cents. I ...
21 votes
Accepted

Algebraic equivalent of SAT?

This is standard and widely used in computer science theory. There are many references that use boolean polynomials with False -> 0 and True -> 1, or in other words, a polynomial over GF(2) used ...
  • 11.1k
20 votes
Accepted

Counting the number of satisfying assignments in a POSITIVE CNF-SAT

This is still #P-complete [1]. This problem is usually referred to as montone (#)SAT. Monotone #2-SAT is already #P-complete (this is equivalent to counting vertex covers of a graph). [1] Roth, Dan. "...
  • 2,049
18 votes

Theoretical explanations for practical success of SAT solvers?

I'm not an expert in this area, but I think the random SAT / phase transition stuff is more or less completely unrelated to the industrial/practical applications stuff. E.g., the very good solvers ...
18 votes

Theoretical explanations for practical success of SAT solvers?

Let me add my two cents of understanding to this, even though I've never actually worked in the area. You're asking one of two questions, "what are all the known approaches to proving theoretical ...
17 votes

Theoretical explanations for practical success of SAT solvers?

There is a paper "Relating Proof Complexity Measures and Practical Hardness of SAT" by Matti Järvisalo, Arie Matsliah, Jakob Nordström, and Stanislav Živný in CP '12 that attempts to link the hardness ...
17 votes

Are there any hard instances of 3-SAT when the clauses can only use literals that are "nearby" each other?

Incident graph of a SAT formula is a bipartite graph that has a vertex for each clause and each variable. We add edges between a clause and all of its variables. If the incident graph has bounded ...
  • 3,430
16 votes

Is there an oracle such that SAT is not infinitely often in sub-exponential time?

You don't have to go to the lengths Lance was suggesting. For example, relative to a random oracle, using the oracle as a one-way function (say, evaluated on consecutive bit postions) is ...
16 votes
Accepted

Complexity of the search version of 2-SAT assuming $\mathsf{L = NL}$

Given a satisfiable 2-CNF $\phi$, you can compute a particular satisfying assignment $e$ by an NL-function (that is, there is an NL-predicate $P(\phi,i)$ that tells you whether $e(x_i)$ is true). One ...
15 votes

Counting the number of satisfying assignments in a POSITIVE CNF-SAT

This problem is Monotone-SAT. It is #P-Complete under Cook Reductions. It is one of those problems that are "easy to decide but hard to count." I recommend the following paper. Self-Reducibility of ...
  • 2,559
14 votes
Accepted

Are there subexponential algorithms for PLANAR SAT known?

Well, you can apply the planar separator theorem together with dynamic programming and get running time $2^{O(\sqrt{n})}$, where $n$ is the number of vertices in the graph. The idea being that you try ...
14 votes

Questions regarding SETH

The subtlety comes in where we introduce the notion of "harder". The reduction showing that SAT can be reduced to Hamiltonian Cycle shows that the latter is "harder" up to polynomial factors. In doing ...
  • 1,643
14 votes
Accepted

On theoretical aproaches for solving $\mathsf{SAT}$ in special cases

Concerning Question 1, there have mainly been two lines of work to find tractable restrictions of SAT. The first one that you are already familiar with is to restrict the types of the clauses that ...
  • 2,049
13 votes
Accepted

Translation of context-free parsing into SAT

(I guess the important word in the original question is ``published''.) There is such an encoding of context-free parsing (more exactly of CYK-style parsing) in Roland Axelsson, Keijo Heljanko, and ...
  • 3,334
13 votes

Is this variation of TQBF still PSPACE-complete?

We proved that this game is PSPACE-complete for 5-CNFs but has Linear Time algorithm for 2-CNFs. The previous best result was Ahlroth and Orponen's 6-CNFs. You can find the conference paper at ISAAC ...
13 votes
Accepted

What are the consequences of solving XOR 3-SAT in Logspace?

Take a look at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022000008001141 "The complexity of satisfiability problems: Refining Schaefer's theorem" by Allender et al. which answer your ...
  • 1,047
13 votes
Accepted

What is the complexity of checking equivalence of two boolean formulae without NOT symbol?

Note that formulas using $\land$ and $\lor$ gates (and possibly the constants $0$ and $1$) are known as monotone. The complexity of monotone formula equivalence depends on how complex formulas are ...
12 votes

Definition of Planar 3-SAT

There's a nice compilation of definitions of related NP-complete planar satisfiability problems at http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.890/fall14/scribe/lec7.pdf One of them, planar monotone 3-sat, allows ...
12 votes
Accepted

Best Upper Bounds on SAT

The best algorithm for 3-SAT now has numerical upper bound $O^{*}(1.306995^n)$ on unique-3-SAT and on general-3-SAT it is also fastest but now the specific values have not been analyzed yet. Authors ...
  • 470
12 votes
Accepted

Limited number of variable occurrences in 1-in-3 SAT

Up to my knowledge the current "limits" have been settled in: Stefan Porschen, Tatjana Schmidt, Ewald Speckenmeyer, Andreas Wotzlaw: XSAT and NAE-SAT of linear CNF classes. Discrete Applied ...
11 votes

On reducing the hardness of CNF-SAT to k-Clique

I don't know the answer to your specific question (it seems related to the question of whether W1=W[2]). But the algorithm you give in your question is subsumed by several other results. Using your ...
11 votes

Algebraic equivalent of SAT?

I think what you are asking about is also known as "polynomial calculus" in proof complexity and SAT solving. It was introduced in [1, 2] to investigate whether coNP can be separated from NP ...
10 votes

Which subproblems of 3SAT are still NP complete?

I asked a similar question on cs.stackexchange.com, perhaps Juho's answer can help you; it contains references to: MONOTONE NAE-3SAT, MONOTONE 1-in-3-SAT, PLANAR 3SAT, k-COLOURABLE MONOTONE NAE-3SAT. ...

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible