Constraint programming solvers support rich global constraints and propagators, which make them both powerful and hard to debug. In the Boolean satisfiability community, proof-logging is the standard solution for generating trustworthy outputs, and this has become key to the social acceptability of computer-generated proofs. However, reusing this technology for constraint programming requires either much weaker propagation, or an impractical blowup in proof length. This paper demonstrates that simple, clean, and efficient proof logging is still possible for the all-different constraint, through pseudo-Boolean reasoning. We explain how such proofs can be expressed and verified mechanistically, describe an implementation, and discuss the broader implications for proof logging in constraint programming.

Pseudo-Boolean solvers hold out the theoretical potential of exponential improvements over conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) SAT solvers, but in practice perform very poorly if the input is given in the standard conjunctive normal form (CNF) format. We present a technique to remedy this problem by recovering cardinality constraints from CNF on the fly during search. This is done by collecting potential building blocks of cardinality constraints during propagation and combining these blocks during conflict analysis. Our implementation has a non-negligible but manageable overhead when detection is not successful, and yields significant gains for some SAT competition and crafted benchmarks for which pseudo-Boolean reasoning is stronger than CDCL. It also boosts performance for some native pseudo-Boolean formulas where this approach helps to improve learned constraints.

Systems mixing Boolean logic and arithmetic have been a long-standing challenge for verification tools such as SATbased bit-vector solvers.Though SAT solvers can be highly efficient for Boolean reasoning, they scale poorly once multiplication is involved.Algebraic methods using Gröbner basis reduction have recently been used to efficiently verify multiplier circuits in isolation, but generally do not perform well on problems involving bit-level reasoning.We propose that pseudo-Boolean solvers equipped with cutting planes reasoning have the potential to combine the complementary strengths of the existing SAT and algebraic approaches while avoiding their weaknesses.Theoretically, we show that there are optimal-length cutting planes proofs for a large class of bit-level properties of some well known multiplier circuits.This scaling is significantly better than the smallest proofs known for SAT and, in some instances, for algebraic methods.We also show that cutting planes reasoning can extract bit-level consequences of word-level equations in exponentially fewer steps than methods based on Gröbner bases.Experimentally, we demonstrate that pseudo-Boolean solvers can verify the word-level equivalence of adder-based multiplier architectures, as well as commutativity of bit-vector multiplication, in times comparable to the best algebraic methods.We then go further than previous approaches and also verify these properties at the bit-level.Finally, we find examples of simple nonlinear bit-vector inequalities that are intractable for current bit-vector and SAT solvers but easy for pseudo-Boolean solvers.

Over the last decades Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solvers based on conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) have developed to the point where they can handle formulas with millions of variables. Yet a deeper understanding of how these solvers can be so successful has remained elusive. In this work we shed light on CDCL performance by using theoretical benchmarks, which have the attractive features of being a) scalable, b) extremal with respect to different proof search parameters, and c) theoretically easy in the sense of having short proofs in the resolution proof system underlying CDCL. This allows for a systematic study of solver heuristics and how efficiently they search for proofs. We report results from extensive experiments on a wide range of benchmarks. Our findings include several examples where theory predicts and explains CDCL behaviour, but also raise a number of intriguing questions for further study.

The last 20 years have seen dramatic improvements in the performance of algorithms for Boolean satisfiability---so-called SAT solvers---and today conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) solvers are routinely used in a wide range of application areas. One serious short-coming of CDCL, however, is that the underlying method of reasoning is quite weak. A tantalizing solution is to instead use stronger pseudo-Boolean (PB) reasoning, but so far the promise of exponential gains in performance has failed to materialize---the increased theoretical strength seems hard to harness algorithmically, and in many applications CDCL-based methods are still superior. We propose a modified approach to pseudo-Boolean solving based on division instead of the saturation rule used in [Chai and Kuehlmann '05] and other PB solvers. In addition to resulting in a stronger conflict analysis, this also improves performance by keeping integer coefficient sizes down, and yields a very competitive solver as shown by the results in the Pseudo-Boolean Competitions 2015 and 2016.