Tie Breaking in Clause Weighting Local Search for SAT

Clause weighting local search methods are widely used for satisfiability testing. A feature of particular importance for such methods is the scheme used to maintain the clause weight distribution relevant to different areas of the search landscape. Existing methods periodically adjust clause weights either multiplicatively or additively. Tie breaking strategies are used whenever a method’s evaluation function encounters more than one optimal candidate flip, with the dominant approach being to break such ties randomly. Although this is acceptable for multiplicative methods as they rarely encounter such situations, additive methods encounter significantly more tie breaking scenarios in their landscapes, and therefore a more refined tie breaking strategy is of much greater relevance. This paper proposes a new way of handling the tie breaking situations frequently encountered in the landscapes of additive constraint weighting local search methods. We demonstrate through an empirical study that when this idea is used to modify the purely random tie breaking strategy of a state-of-the-art solver, the modified method significantly outperforms the existing one on a range of benchmarks, especially when we consider the encodings of large and structured problems. Content Areas: Search, Constraint Satisfaction