Towards An Understanding Of Hill-Climbing Procedures For SAT

Abstract

Recently several local hill-climbing procedures for propositional satisfiability have been proposed which are able to solve large and difficult problems beyond the reach of conventional algorithms like Davis-Putnam. By the introduction of some new variants of these procedures, we provide strong experimental evidence to support our conjecture that neither greediness nor randomness is important in these procedures. One of the variants introduced seems to offer significant improvements over earlier procedures. In addition, we investigate experimentally how performance depends on their parameters. Our results suggest that runtime scales less than simply exponentially in the problem size.