A kolmogorov complexity proof of the lovász local lemma for satisfiability
COCOON'11 Proceedings of the 17th annual international conference on Computing and combinatorics
The local lemma is tight for SAT
Proceedings of the twenty-second annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete Algorithms
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
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We consider boolean formulas in conjunctive normal form (CNF). If all clauses are large, it needs many clauses to obtain an unsatisfiable formula; moreover, these clauses have to interleave. We review quantitative results for the amount of interleaving required, many of which rely on the Lovász Local Lemma, a probabilistic lemma with many applications in combinatorics.In positive terms, we are interested in simple combinatorial conditions which guarantee for a CNF formula to be satisfiable. The criteria obtained are nontrivial in the sense that even though they are easy to check, it is by far not obvious how to compute a satisfying assignment efficiently in case the conditions are fulfilled; until recently, it was not known how to do so. It is also remarkable that while deciding satisfiability is trivial for formulas that satisfy the conditions, a slightest relaxation of the conditions leads us into the territory of NP-completeness.Several open problems remain, some of which we mention in the concluding section.