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Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 6, The: Satisfiability

Donald Knuth · 1 HN points · 3 HN comments
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Amazon Summary
This multivolume work on the analysis of algorithms has long been recognized as the definitive description of classical computer science. The four volumes published to date already comprise a unique and invaluable resource in programming theory and practice. Countless readers have spoken about the profound personal influence of Knuth’s writings. Scientists have marveled at the beauty and elegance of his analysis, while practicing programmers have successfully applied his “cookbook” solutions to their day-to-day problems. All have admired Knuth for the breadth, clarity, accuracy, and good humor found in his books. To continue the fourth and later volumes of the set, and to update parts of the existing volumes, Knuth has created a series of small books called fascicles, which are published at regular intervals. Each fascicle encompasses a section or more of wholly new or revised material. Ultimately, the content of these fascicles will be rolled up into the comprehensive, final versions of each volume, and the enormous undertaking that began in 1962 will be complete. Volume 4 Fascicle 6 This fascicle, brimming with lively examples, forms the middle third of what will eventually become hardcover Volume 4B. It introduces and surveys “Satisfiability,’’ one of the most fundamental problems in all of computer science: Given a Boolean function, can its variables be set to at least one pattern of 0s and 1s that will make the function true? Satisfiability is far from an abstract exercise in understanding formal systems. Revolutionary methods for solving such problems emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and they’ve led to game-changing applications in industry. These so-called “SAT solvers’’ can now routinely find solutions to practical problems that involve millions of variables and were thought until very recently to be hopelessly difficult. Fascicle 6 presents full details of seven different SAT solvers, ranging from simple algorithms suitable for small problems to state-of-the-art algorithms of industrial strength. Many other significant topics also arise in the course of the discussion, such as bounded model checking, the theory of traces, Las Vegas algorithms, phase changes in random processes, the efficient encoding of problems into conjunctive normal form, and the exploitation of global and local symmetries. More than 500 exercises are provided, arranged carefully for self-instruction, together with detailed answers.
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

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There has been big progress in automated theorem proving lately

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_theorem_proving

you just don't hear about it much because the technology is not so fashionable today. Also it is more clear what the limits are, I mean, Turing, Godel, Tarski and all of those apply to neural networks as well any other formal system but people mostly forget it.

Knuth wrote a really fun volume of The Art of Computer Programming about advances in SAT solvers which are the foundation for theorem provers

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Computer-Programming-Fascicle-Sat...

Everybody is aware that neural network techniques have improved drastically in performance, it's much more obscure that the toolbox of symbolic A.I. has improved greatly. Back in the 1980s production rules engines struggled to handle 10,000 rules, now Drools can handle 1,000,000+ rules with no problems.

sva_
> There has been big progress in automated theorem proving lately

It doesn't seem like there has been much progress for anything but FOL?

PaulHoule
It's clear that commonsense reasoning needs to deal with modals, counterfactuals, defaults, temporal logic, etc.

It's not hard to add some extensions to logic for a particular application but a very hard problem to develop a general purpose extended logic.

I look at the logic-adjacent production rules systems which never really standardized some of the commonly necessary things such as agendas, priorities, defaults, etc.

thwayunion
The wiki article on automated theorem proving is quite bad as an overview of the active field; it's more a historical article about the mid to late 20th century. Most of the interesting things in automated reasoning have happened since the naughts, and that article kind of stops in the 90s

SMT solvers have gotten quite good over the past couple decades, there are tons of domain-specific tools (eg in software and hardware verification), tons of niche applied decidable or semi-decidable theories (eg various modal and description logics), a lot of progress on the proof assistant ("non-fully-automated theorem proving") paradigm, and so on.

Vol 4A was published in 2011: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Computer-Programming-Combinatoria...

Vol 4B was partially published in fascicles: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Computer-Programming-Fascicle-Pre... and https://www.amazon.com/Art-Computer-Programming-Fascicle-Sat...

Instead of the ultimate edition of vols 1-3, so far we've got a "patch" by Martin Ruckert who coordinated the volunteers: https://www.amazon.com/MMIX-Supplement-Computer-Programming-...

hvidgaard
Thanks for the pointers.

This https://cs.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html seems up to date.

Donald Knuth recently released the latest chapter of 'The Art of Computer Programming' and decided to tackle the topic of Satisfiability & SAT solvers ( @ https://www.amazon.com/Art-Computer-Programming-Fascicle-Sat... ). Although he refers to algorithms in an vague way (using words like "Algorithm A" or "Algorithm J") and makes a determined effort to convey all information in the most mathematically precise way possible, I'm of the view that it's the finest work of it's kind on this topic. Having a section on something like 'random restarts' is great, but if you are already deep enough to have an interest in a paper like this, you are deep enough to learn about Luby sequences.
Sep 12, 2015 · 1 points, 1 comments · submitted by djd3141
bloodorange
referrer link?
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