On market-inspired approaches to propositional satisfiability

  • Authors:

  • William E. Walsh;Makoto Yokoo;Katsutoshi Hirayama;Michael P. Wellman

  • Affiliations:

  • IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY;NTT Communication Science Laboratories, 2-4 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-0237, Japan;Kobe University of Mercantile Marine, 5-1-1 Fukaeminami-machi, Higashinada-ku, Kobe 658-0022, Japan;University of Michigan AI Laboratory, 1101 Beal Ave, Ann Arbor, MI

  • Venue:
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

We describe three market-inspired approaches to propositional satisfiability. The first is based on a formulation of safisfiability as production on a supply chain, where producers of particular variable assignments must acquire licenses to fail to satisfy particular clauses. Experiments show that although this general supply-chain protocol can converge to market allocations corresponding to satisfiable truth assignments, it is impractically slow. We find that a simplified market structure and a variation on the pricing method can improve performance significantly. We compare the performance of the three market-based protocols with distributed breakout algorithm and GSAT on benchmark 3-SAT problems. We identify a tradeoff between performance and economic realism in the market protocols, and a tradeoff between performance and the degree of decentralization between the market protocols and distributed breakout. We also conduct informal and experimental analyses to gain insight into the operation of price-guided search.