Lecture: Satisfiability and SAT Solvers

Background Material

• Propositional Calculus
• Elementary Metamathematics (CNF)
• Recursion

Reading

• Wikipedia page on Boolean Satisfiability
• Wikipedia page on Conjunctive Normal Form
• David Wheeler's MiniSAT User Guide

Topics

• Conjunctive Normal Form
• Satisfiability
• MiniSAT SAT Solver
• Translation to SAT problems
  1. Avionics example from Pete Manolios
  2. N-Queens
• DPLL algorithm

Lecture Notes

• sat.pptx or sat.pdf
• nqueens.pptx or nqueens.pdf

Programs

• MiniSAT
• MiniSAT in your Browser
• avionics.py - python script to generate MiniSAT input for avionics example
• aircraft - avionics example input for MiniSAT (10 apps and 5 cabinets)
• nqueens.py - python script to generate MiniSAT input for N-queens problem.
• nq3 - MiniSAT input for 3-queens problem.
• nq4 - MiniSAT input for 4-queens problem.
• nq4_out - MiniSAT output from 4-queens problem.

Resources

• None.

Assignments

• Use MiniSAT to solve the N-queens problem. Verify that the answer returned is correct (in class)