Sponsored by the Rutgers University Department of Mathematics and the
Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS)
Title: Symmetry Breaking in SAT and QBF
Speaker: Manuel Kauers, Johannes Kepler Universität
Date: Thursday, February 8, 2018 5:00pm
Location: Hill Center, Room 705, Rutgers University, Busch Campus, Piscataway, NJ
Abstract:
In principle it is easy to find a solution of a boolean formula--just try out all possibilities. In practice however, the problem is not so simple, because the number of possibilities is so huge. Although it is hopeless to iterate over, say, 2^10000 possibilities, modern SAT can handle problems with 10000 or even more variables. They have a chance of success because they employ a carefully chosen combination of several techniques for cutting off irrelevant parts of the search tree. One such technique consists of exploiting the symmetries of the input formula. We will explain how this works and then present some recent joint work with Martina Seidl on an extension of these ideas to so-called quantified boolean formulas.