Solving and Verifying the Boolean Pythagorean Triples Problem via Cube-and-Conquer

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Publication:2818017




Abstract: The boolean Pythagorean Triples problem has been a longstanding open problem in Ramsey Theory: Can the set N = 1,2,... of natural numbers be divided into two parts, such that no part contains a triple (a,b,c) with a2+b2=c2 ? A prize for the solution was offered by Ronald Graham over two decades ago. We solve this problem, proving in fact the impossibility, by using the Cube-and-Conquer paradigm, a hybrid SAT method for hard problems, employing both look-ahead and CDCL solvers. An important role is played by dedicated look-ahead heuristics, which indeed allowed to solve the problem on a cluster with 800 cores in about 2 days. Due to the general interest in this mathematical problem, our result requires a formal proof. Exploiting recent progress in unsatisfiability proofs of SAT solvers, we produced and verified a proof in the DRAT format, which is almost 200 terabytes in size. From this we extracted and made available a compressed certificate of 68 gigabytes, that allows anyone to reconstruct the DRAT proof for checking.




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