Tabu Search vs. Random Walk

We investigate the benefit of Tabu Search for satisfiability (SAT) and constraint satisfaction problems (CSP and compare it to the more frequently used random walk heuristic. We argue, that a more deterministic direction of search as done with Tabu Search is worth considering also for SAT and CSP. We give experimental evidence that Tabu Search can be used to efficiently guide local search procedures like GSAT and WSAT for SAT and the min conflicts heuristic for CSP. The algorithms are tested on randomly generated problems and hard graph coloring instances from the DIMACS benchmark test set. Additionally, we give some explanation on the value of Tabu Search.[/ p]

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