An Exponential Separation between Deterministic CDCL and DPLL Solvers

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Samar, Sahil, Vinyals, Marc, Ganesh, Vijay
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Samar, Sahil
Vinyals, Marc
Ganesh, Vijay
author_facet Samar, Sahil
Vinyals, Marc
Ganesh, Vijay
contents We prove that there exists a deterministic configuration of Conflict Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) SAT solvers using a variant of the VSIDS branching heuristic that solves instances of the Ordering Principle (OP) CNF formulas in time polynomial in n, where n is the number of variables in such formulas. Since tree-like resolution is known to have an exponential lower bound for proof size for OP formulas, it follows that CDCL under this configuration has an exponential separation with any solver that is polynomially equivalent to tree-like resolution and therefore any configuration of DPLL SAT solvers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_16156
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Exponential Separation between Deterministic CDCL and DPLL Solvers
Samar, Sahil
Vinyals, Marc
Ganesh, Vijay
Computational Complexity
We prove that there exists a deterministic configuration of Conflict Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) SAT solvers using a variant of the VSIDS branching heuristic that solves instances of the Ordering Principle (OP) CNF formulas in time polynomial in n, where n is the number of variables in such formulas. Since tree-like resolution is known to have an exponential lower bound for proof size for OP formulas, it follows that CDCL under this configuration has an exponential separation with any solver that is polynomially equivalent to tree-like resolution and therefore any configuration of DPLL SAT solvers.
title An Exponential Separation between Deterministic CDCL and DPLL Solvers
topic Computational Complexity
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16156