Chaff engineering an efficient SAT solver

Boolean Satisfiability is probably the most studied of combinatorial optimization/search problems. Significant effort has been devoted to trying to provide practical solutions to this problem for problem instances encountered in a range of applications in Electronic Design Automation (EDA), as well...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Design Automation, 2001 Proceedings pp. 530 - 535
Main Authors: Moskewicz, Matthew W., Madigan, Conor F., Zhao, Ying, Zhang, Lintao, Malik, Sharad
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 01.01.2001
IEEE
Series:ACM Conferences
Subjects:
ISBN:1581132972, 9781581132977
ISSN:0738-100X
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Boolean Satisfiability is probably the most studied of combinatorial optimization/search problems. Significant effort has been devoted to trying to provide practical solutions to this problem for problem instances encountered in a range of applications in Electronic Design Automation (EDA), as well as in Artificial Intelligence (AI). This study has culminated in the development of several SAT packages, both proprietary and in the public domain (e.g. GRASP, SATO) which find significant use in both research and industry. Most existing complete solvers are variants of the Davis-Putnam (DP) search algorithm. In this paper we describe the development of a new complete solver, Chaff, which achieves significant performance gains through careful engineering of all aspects of the search - especially a particularly efficient implementation of Boolean constraint propagation (BCP) and a novel low overhead decision strategy. Chaff has been able to obtain one to two orders of magnitude performance improvement on difficult SAT benchmarks in comparison with other solvers (DP or otherwise), including GRASP and SATO.
ISBN:1581132972
9781581132977
ISSN:0738-100X
DOI:10.1145/378239.379017