@inproceedings{f6e52c7dfc4e4ee997fbdcde9f1f15c1,
title = "On the empirical time complexity of scale-free 3-sat at the phase transition",
abstract = "The hardness of formulas at the solubility phase transition of random propositional satisfiability (SAT) has been intensely studied for decades both empirically and theoretically. Solvers based on stochastic local search (SLS) appear to scale very well at the critical threshold, while complete backtracking solvers exhibit exponential scaling. On industrial SAT instances, this phenomenon is inverted: backtracking solvers can tackle large industrial problems, where SLS-based solvers appear to stall. Industrial instances exhibit sharply different structure than uniform random instances. Among many other properties, they are often heterogeneous in the sense that some variables appear in many while others appear in only few clauses. We conjecture that the heterogeneity of SAT formulas alone already contributes to the trade-off in performance between SLS solvers and complete backtracking solvers. We empirically determine how the run time of SLS vs. backtracking solvers depends on the heterogeneity of the input, which is controlled by drawing variables according to a scale-free distribution. Our experiments reveal that the efficiency of complete solvers at the phase transition is strongly related to the heterogeneity of the degree distribution. We report results that suggest the depth of satisfying assignments in complete search trees is influenced by the level of heterogeneity as measured by a power-law exponent. We also find that incomplete SLS solvers, which scale well on uniform instances, are not affected by heterogeneity. The main contribution of this paper utilizes the scale-free random 3-SAT model to isolate heterogeneity as an important factor in the scaling discrepancy between complete and SLS solvers at the uniform phase transition found in previous works.",
author = "Thomas Bl{\"a}sius and Tobias Friedrich and Sutton, {Andrew M}",
year = "2019",
month = jan,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1007/978-3-030-17462-0_7",
language = "English (US)",
isbn = "9783030174613",
series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)",
publisher = "Springer Verlag",
pages = "117--134",
editor = "Tom{\'a}{\v s} Vojnar and Lijun Zhang",
booktitle = "Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems - 25th International Conference, TACAS 2019, Held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2019, Proceedings",
note = "25th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems conference series, TACAS 2019 held as part of the 22nd European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2019 ; Conference date: 06-04-2019 Through 11-04-2019",
}