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Treewidth: A Useful Marker of Empirical Hardness in Quantified Boolean Logic Encodings

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5330))

Abstract

Theoretical studies show that in some combinatorial problems, there is a close relationship between classes of tractable instances and the treewidth (tw) of graphs describing their structure. In the case of satisfiability for quantified Boolean formulas (QBFs), tractable classes can be related to a generalization of treewidth, that we call quantified treewidth (tw p ). In this paper we investigate the practical relevance of computing tw p for problem domains encoded as QBFs. We show that an approximation of tw p is a predictor of empirical hardness, and that it is the only parameter among several other candidates which succeeds consistently in being so. We also provide evidence that QBF solvers benefit from a preprocessing phase geared towards reducing tw p , and that such phase is a potential enabler for the solution of hard QBF encodings.

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Pulina, L., Tacchella, A. (2008). Treewidth: A Useful Marker of Empirical Hardness in Quantified Boolean Logic Encodings . In: Cervesato, I., Veith, H., Voronkov, A. (eds) Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Reasoning. LPAR 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5330. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89439-1_37

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89439-1_37

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-89438-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-89439-1

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