Random 3-SAT and BDDs: The Plot Thickens Further
Alfonso San Miguel Aguirre5 and MosheY. Vardi6
| (5) |
Dept. of Computer Science, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico, Rio Hondo 1, 01000 Mexico City, Mexico |
| (6) |
Department of Computer Science, Rice University, 6100 S. Main St MS 132, 77005-1892 Houston, TX, USA |
Abstract
This paper contains an experimental study of the impact of the construction strategy of reduced, ordered binary decision diagrams
(ROBDDs) on the average-case computational complexity of random 3-SAT, using the CUDD package.We study the variation of median
running times for a large collection of random 3-SAT problems as a function of the density as well as the order (number of
variables) of the instances.We used ROBDD-based pure SAT-solving algorithms, which we obtained by an aggressive application
of existential quantification, augmented by several heuristic optimizations. Our main finding is that our algorithms display
an “easy-hard-less-hard” pattern that is quite similar to that observed earlier for search-based solvers. When we start with low-density instances
and then increase the density, we go from a region of polynomial running time, to a region of exponential running time, where
the exponent first increases and then decreases as a function of the density. The locations of both transitions, from polynomial
to exponential and from increasing to decreasing exponent, are algorithm dependent. In particular, the running time peak is
quite independent from the crossover density of 4.26 (where the probability of satisfiability declines precipitously); it
occurs at density 3.8 for one algorithm and at density 2.3 for for another, demonstrating that the correlation between the
crossover density and computational hardness is algorithm dependent.
Part of this work was done while this author was on sabbatical at Rice University, funded in part by CONACyT grant 145502.
Work partially supported by NSF grants IIS-9908435, IIS-9978135, CCR-9988322, and EIA- 0086264, and by a grant from the Intel
Corporation.
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