There are no CNF problems

Abstract

SAT technology has improved rapidly in recent years, to the point now where it can solve CNF problems of immense size. But solving CNF problems ignores one important fact: there are NO problems that are originally CNF. All the CNF that SAT solvers tackle is the result of modelling some real world problem, and mapping the high-level constraints and decisions modelling the problem into clauses on binary variables. But by throwing away the high level view of the problem SAT solving may have lost a lot of important insight into how the problem is best solved. In this talk I will hope to persuade you that by keeping the original high level model of the problem one can realise immense benefits in solving hard real world problems. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.