The strength of the dominance rule
Abstract
It has become standard that, when a SAT solver decides that a CNF is unsatisfiable, it produces a certificate of unsatisfiability in the form of a refutation of in some proof system. The system typically used is DRAT, which is equivalent to extended resolution (ER) -- for example, until this year DRAT refutations were required in the annual SAT competition. Recently [Bogaerts et al.~2023] introduced a new proof system, associated with the tool VeriPB, which is at least as strong as DRAT and is further able to handle certain symmetry-breaking techniques. We show that this system simulates the proof system , which allows limited reasoning with QBFs and forms the first level above ER in a natural hierarchy of proof systems. This hierarchy is not known to be strict, but nevertheless this is evidence that the system of [Bogaerts et al. 2023] is plausibly strictly stronger than ER and DRAT. In the other direction, we show that symmetry-breaking for a single symmetry can be handled inside ER.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2406.13657,
title = {The strength of the dominance rule},
author = {Leszek Aleksander Kołodziejczyk and Neil Thapen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.13657},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
To appear in the proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2024)