Evaluating CDCL Variable Scoring Schemes

Armin Biere, Andreas Fröhlich

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

The VSIDS (variable state independent decaying sum) decision heuristic invented in the context of the CDCL (conflict-driven clause learning) SAT solver Chaff, is considered crucial for achieving high efficiency of modern SAT solvers on application benchmarks. This paper proposes ACIDS (average conflict-index decision score), a variant of VSIDS. The ACIDS heuristics is compared to the original implementation of VSIDS, its popular modern implementation EVSIDS (exponential VSIDS), the VMTF (variable move-to-front) scheme, and other related decision heuristics. They all share the important principle to select those variables as decisions, which recently participated in conflicts. The main goal of the paper is to provide an empirical evaluation to serve as a starting point for trying to understand the reason for the efficiency of these decision heuristics. In our experiments, it turns out that EVSIDS, VMTF, ACIDS behave very similarly, if implemented carefully.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProc. 18th Intl. Conf. on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing
PublisherSpringer
Pages405-422
Number of pages18
Volume9340
Publication statusPublished - 2015

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)

Fields of science

  • 102 Computer Sciences
  • 603109 Logic
  • 202006 Computer hardware

JKU Focus areas

  • Computation in Informatics and Mathematics

Cite this