The local lemma Is asymptotically tight for SAT

DOI10.1145/2975386zbMATH Open1426.68121arXiv1006.0744OpenAlexW2395370258WikidataQ124807321 ScholiaQ124807321MaRDI QIDQ3177819FDOQ3177819

Authors: Heidi Gebauer, Tibor Szabó, Gábor Tardos 

Publication date: 2 August 2018

Published in: Journal of the ACM (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The Local Lemma is a fundamental tool of probabilistic combinatorics and theoretical computer science, yet there are hardly any natural problems known where it provides an asymptotically tight answer. The main theme of our paper is to identify several of these problems, among them a couple of widely studied extremal functions related to certain restricted versions of the k-SAT problem, where the Local Lemma does give essentially optimal answers. As our main contribution, we construct unsatisfiable k-CNF formulas where every clause has k distinct literals and every variable appears in at most (2/e + o(1))*2^k/k clauses. The Lopsided Local Lemma shows that this is asymptotically best possible. The determination of this extremal function is particularly important as it represents the value where the corresponding k-SAT problem exhibits a complexity hardness jump: from having every instance being a YES-instance it becomes NP-hard just by allowing each variable to occur in one more clause. The construction of our unsatisfiable CNF-formulas is based on the binary tree approach of [16] and thus the constructed formulas are in the class MU(1) of minimal unsatisfiable formulas having one more clauses than variables. The main novelty of our approach here comes in setting up an appropriate continuous approximation of the problem. This leads us to a differential equation, the solution of which we are able to estimate. The asymptotically optimal binary trees are then obtained through a discretization of this solution. The importance of the binary trees constructed is also underlined by their appearance in many other scenarios. In particular, they give asymptotically precise answers for seemingly unrelated problems like the European Tenure Game introduced by Doerr [9] and a search problem allowing a limited number of consecutive lies.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1006.0744

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zbMATH Keywords

extremal combinatoricslocal lemmasatisfiability of \(k\)-CNF formulas

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Analysis of algorithms and problem complexity (68Q25) Combinatorics in computer science (68R05) Extremal problems in graph theory (05C35) Computational difficulty of problems (lower bounds, completeness, difficulty of approximation, etc.) (68Q17) Probabilistic methods in extremal combinatorics, including polynomial methods (combinatorial Nullstellensatz, etc.) (05D40) Probabilistic games; gambling (91A60)

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• The Discrepancy of Unsatisfiable Matrices and a Lower Bound for the Komlós Conjecture Constant
• New bounds for the Moser‐Tardos distribution
• Disproof of the Neighborhood Conjecture with Implications to SAT
• The Lovász Local Lemma and Satisfiability
• Comparison of two convergence criteria for the variable-assignment Lopsided Lovász Local Lemma
• Deterministic algorithms for the Lovász local lemma: Simpler, more general, and more parallel

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