Visualizing the Internal Structure of SAT Instances (Preliminary Report)

Modern algorithms for the SAT problem reveal an almost tractable behavior on “real-world” instances. This is frequently contributed to the fact that these instances possess an internal “structure” that hard problem instances do not exhibit. However, little is known about this internal structure. We therefore propose a visualization of the instance’s variable interaction graph (and of its dynamic change during a run of a SAT-solver) as a first step of an empirical research program to analyze the problem structure. We present first results of such an analysis on instances of bounded model checking benchmark problems.