The backdoor key: a path to understanding problem hardness

  • Authors:

  • Yongshao Ruan;Henry Kautz;Eric Horvitz

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA

  • Venue:
  • AAAI'04 Proceedings of the 19th national conference on Artifical intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We introduce our work on the backdoor key, a concept that shows promise for characterizing problem hardness in backtracking search algorithms. The general notion of backdoors was recently introduced to explain the source of heavy-tailed behaviors in backtracking algorithms (Williams, Gomes, & Selman 2003a; 2003b). We describe empirical studies that show that the key faction, i.e., the ratio of the key size to the corresponding backdoor size, is a good predictor of problem hardness of ensembles and individual instances within an ensemble for structure domains with large key fraction.