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International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming

CP 2004: Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming – CP 2004 pp 453–467Cite as

Symbolic Decision Procedures for QBF

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 3258))

Abstract

Much recent work has gone into adapting techniques that were originally developed for SAT solving to QBF solving. In particular, QBF solvers are often based on SAT solvers. Most competitive QBF solvers are search-based. In this work we explore an alternative approach to QBF solving, based on symbolic quantifier elimination. We extend some recent symbolic approaches for SAT solving to symbolic QBF solving, using various decision-diagram formalisms such as OBDDs and ZDDs. In both approaches, QBF formulas are solved by eliminating all their quantifiers. Our first solver, QMRES, maintains a set of clauses represented by a ZDD and eliminates quantifiers via multi-resolution. Our second solver, QBDD, maintains a set of OBDDs, and eliminate quantifier by applying them to the underlying OBDDs. We compare our symbolic solvers to several competitive search-based solvers. We show that QBDD is not competitive, but QMRES compares favorably with search-based solvers on various benchmarks consisting of non-random formulas.

Supported in part by NSF grants CCR-9988322, CCR-0124077, CCR-0311326, IIS-9908435, IIS-9978135, EIA-0086264, ANI-0216467, and by BSF grant 9800096.

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  1. Dept. of Computer Science, Rice University,  

    Guoqiang Pan & Moshe Y. Vardi

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  1. Guoqiang Pan
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  2. Moshe Y. Vardi
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  1. Clayton School of IT, Monash University, Australia

    Mark Wallace

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Pan, G., Vardi, M.Y. (2004). Symbolic Decision Procedures for QBF. In: Wallace, M. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming – CP 2004. CP 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3258. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30201-8_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30201-8_34

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-23241-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-30201-8

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