Behind the Scenes of Chronological CDCL

Description

Combining conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) with chronological backtracking is challenging: Multiple invariants considered crucial in modern SAT solvers are violated, if after conflict analysis the solver does not jump to the assertion level but to a higher decision level instead. In their SAT'18 paper "Chronological Backtracking", Alexander Nadel and Vadim Ryvchim provide a fix to this issue. Moreover, their SAT solver implementing chronological backtracking won the main track of the SAT Competition 2018. In our SAT'19 paper, "Backing Backtracking", we present a formalization and generalization of this method. We prove its correctness and provide an independent implementation. In this seminar, we demonstrate the working of chronological CDCL by means of an example. In this example, after a conflict the conflicting clause contains only one literal at conflict level. It is therefore used as a reason for backtracking, thus saving the effort of conflict analysis. We further show which invariants are violated and present new ones followed by a discussion of the rules of our formal framework. We also shed light onto implementation details, including those which are not mentioned in our SAT'19 paper.

Period	26 Jun 2020
Event title	unbekannt/unknown
Event type	Other
Location	AustriaShow on map