ACM Home Page
Please provide us with feedback. Feedback
Digital Library logoTake a look at the new version of this page: [ beta version ]. Tell us what you think.
Message-passing and local heuristics as decimation strategies for satisfiability
Full text PdfPdf (655 KB)
Source
Symposium on Applied Computing archive
Proceedings of the 2009 ACM symposium on Applied Computing table of contents
Honolulu, Hawaii
SESSION: Constraint solving and programming track table of contents
Pages: 1408-1414  
Year of Publication: 2009
ISBN:978-1-60558-166-8
Authors
Lukas Kroc  Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Ashish Sabharwal  Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Bart Selman  Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Sponsor
SIGAPP: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing
Publisher
ACM  New York, NY, USA
Bibliometrics
Downloads (6 Weeks): 3,   Downloads (12 Months): 38,   Citation Count: 0
Additional Information:

abstract   references   index terms   collaborative colleagues  

Tools and Actions: Request Permissions Request Permissions    Review this Article  
DOI Bookmark: Use this link to bookmark this Article: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1529282.1529596
What is a DOI?

ABSTRACT

Decimation is a simple process for solving constraint satisfaction problems, by repeatedly fixing variable values and simplifying without reconsidering earlier decisions. We investigate different decimation strategies, contrasting those based on local, syntactic information from those based on message passing, such as statistical physics based Survey Propagation (SP) and the related and more well-known Belief Propagation (BP). Our results reveal that once we resolve convergence issues, BP itself can solve fairly hard random k-SAT formulas through decimation; the gap between BP and SP narrows down quickly as k increases. We also investigate observable differences between BP/SP and other common CSP heuristics as decimation proceeds, exploring the hardness of the decimated formulas and identifying a somewhat unexpected feature of message passing heuristics, namely, unlike other heuristics for satisfiability, they avoid unit propagation as variables are fixed.


REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

 
1
D. Achlioptas, A. Naor, and Y. Peres. Rigorous location of phase transitions in hard optimization problems. Nature, 435: 759--764, 2005.
 
2
A. Braunstein and R. Zecchina. Survey propagation as local equilibrium equations. J. Stat. Mech., P06007, 2004. URL http://lanl.arXiv.org/cond-mat/0312483.
3
4
 
5
N. Eén and N. Sörensson. MiniSat: A SAT solver with conflictclause minimization. In 8th SAT, St. Andrews, U.K., June 2005.
 
6
M. Hajiaghayi and G. B. Sorkin. The satisability threshold of random 3-SAT is at least 3.52. Technical Report RC22942, IBM Research Report, 2003. http://arxiv.org/pdf/math.CO/0310193.
 
7
E. I. Hsu and S. A. McIlraith. Characterizing propagation methods for boolean satisfiabilty. In 9th SAT, volume 4121 of LNCS, pages 325--338, Seattle, WA, Aug. 2006.
 
8
 
9
L. Kroc, A. Sabharwal, and B. Selman. Survey propagation revisited. In 23rd UAI, pages 217--226, Vancouver, BC, July 2007.
 
10
L. Kroc, A. Sabharwal, and B. Selman. Leveraging belief propagation, backtrack search, and statistics for model counting. In 5th CPAIOR, volume 5015 of LNCS, pages 127--141, Paris, France, May 2008.
11
 
12
 
13
M. Mézard, G. Parisi, and R. Zecchina. Analytic and algorithmic solution of random satisfiability problems. Science, 297(5582): 812--815, 2002.
 
14
J. M. Mooij, B. Wemmenhove, H. J. Kappen, and T. Rizzo. Loop corrected belief propagation. In Proc. 11th Intl. Conf. on AI and Statistics (AISTATS-07), 2007.
15
 
16
K. Murphy, Y. Weiss, and M. Jordan. Loopy belief propagation for approximate inference: An empirical study. In 15th UAI, pages 467--475, Sweden, July 1999.
 
17
 
18
M. Pretti. A message-passing algorithm with damping. J. Stat. Mech., P11008, 2005.
 
19
B. Selman, H. Kautz, and B. Cohen. Local search strategies for satisfiability testing. In D. S. Johnson and M. A. Trick, editors, Cliques, Coloring and Satisfiability: the Second DIMACS Implementation Challenge, volume 26 of DIMACS Series in DMTCS, pages 521--532. Amer. Math. Soc., 1996.
 
20
J. S. Yedidia, W. T. Freeman, and Y. Weiss. Generalized belief propagation. In NIPS, pages 689--695, 2000.
 
21

Collaborative Colleagues:
Lukas Kroc: colleagues
Ashish Sabharwal: colleagues
Bart Selman: colleagues