Manuel Kauers, Johannes Kepler University

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.