An Application of Matroid Theory to the SAT Problem

  • Authors:
  • Oliver Kullmann

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • COCO '00 Proceedings of the 15th Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

We consider the deficiency \math(F):=c(F) - n(F) and the maximal deficiency \math * (F) :=maxF1\math F \math(F) of a clause-set F (a conjunctive normal form), where c(F) is the number of clauses in F and n(F) is the number of variables.Combining ideas from matching and matroid theory with techniques from the area of resolution refutations, we prove that for clause-sets F with p\math * (F) \math k, where k is considered as a constant, the SAT problem, the minimally unsatisfiability problem and the MAXSAT problem are decidable in polynomial time (previously, only poly-time decidability of the minimally unsatisfiability problem was known, and that only for k = 1).