{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"A backbone-search heuristic for efficient solving of hard 3-SAT formulae","authors":[{"name":"Olivier Dubois","slug":"olivier-dubois","given":"Olivier","family":"Dubois","affiliation":""},{"name":"Gilles Dequen","slug":"gilles-dequen","given":"Gilles","family":"Dequen","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"Of late, new insight into the study of random -SAT formulae has been gained from the introduction of a concept inspired by models of physics, the ‘backbone’ of a SAT formula which corresponds to the variables having a fixed truth value in all assignments satisfying the maximum number of clauses. In the present paper, we show that this concept, already invaluable from a theoretical viewpoint in the study of the satisfiability transition, can also play an important role in the design of efficient DPL-type algorithms for solving hard random -SAT formulae and more specifically -SAT formulae. We define a heuristic search for variables belonging to the backbone of a -SAT formula which are chosen as branch nodes for the tree developed by a DPL-type procedure. We give in addition a simple technique to magnify the effect of the heuristic. Implementation yields DPL-type algorithms with a significant performance improvement over the best current algorithms, making it possible to handle unsatisfiable hard 3-SAT formulae up to 700 variables.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2001/35","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2001/0035.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2001/35.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2001/bibtex/35","volume":{"slug":"2001","title":"Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2001","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2001/","year":2001,"location":"Seattle, Washington, USA","dates":"","editors":"","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":null,"track":"","number":35,"pages":{"first":248,"last":252},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}