Abstract
A k-CNF (conjunctive normal form) formula is a regular (k, s)-CNF one if every variable occurs s times in the formula, where k ⩾ 2 and s > 0 are integers. Regular (3, s)-CNF formulas have some good structural properties, so carrying out a probability analysis of the structure for random formulas of this type is easier than conducting such an analysis for random 3-CNF formulas. Some subclasses of the regular (3, s)-CNF formula have also characteristics of intractability that differ from random 3-CNF formulas. For this purpose, we propose strictly d-regular (k, 2s)-CNF formula, which is a regular (k, 2s)-CNF formula for which d ⩾ 0 is an even number and each literal occurs \(s - {d \over 2}\) or \(s + {d \over 2}\) times (the literals from a variable x are x and ¬x, where x is positive and ¬x is negative). In this paper, we present a new model to generate strictly d-regular random (k, 2s)-CNF formulas, and focus on the strictly d-regular random (3, 2s)-CNF formulas. Let F be a strictly d-regular random (3, 2s)-CNF formula such that 2s > d. We show that there exists a real number s0 such that the formula F is unsatisfiable with high probability when s > s0, and present a numerical solution for the real number s0. The result is supported by simulated experiments, and is consistent with the existing conclusion for the case of d = 0. Furthermore, we have a conjecture: for a given d, the strictly d-regular random (3, 2s)-SAT problem has an SAT-UNSAT (satisfiable-unsatisfiable) phase transition. Our experiments support this conjecture. Finally, our experiments also show that the parameter d is correlated with the intractability of the 3-SAT problem. Therefore, our research maybe helpful for generating random hard instances of the 3-CNF formula.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China for supporting this work (Grant Nos. 61762019, 61462001 and 61862051), and thank Haiyue Zhang, and Zufeng Fu for their suggestions for the article writing.
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Yongping Wang received the master of science degree from Guizhou Normal University, China in 2012. He is currently working toward the PhD degree at College of Computer Science and Technology, Guizhou University, China. His research interests include computability and computational complexity.
Daoyun Xu received the PhD degree from Nanjing University, China in 2002. He is a professor and PhD supervisor at College of Computer Science and Technology, Guizhou University, China, and the senior member of CCF. His research interests include computability and computational complexity, algorithm design and analysis.
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Wang, Y., Xu, D. Properties of the satisfiability threshold of the strictly d-regular random (3,2s)-SAT problem. Front. Comput. Sci. 14, 146404 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-020-9248-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-020-9248-0