Backing Backtracking

Abstract

Non-chronological backtracking was considered an important and necessary feature of conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL). However, a SAT solver combining CDCL with chronological backtracking succeeded in the main track of the SAT Competition 2018. In that solver, multiple invariants considered crucial for CDCL were violated. In particular, decision levels of literals on the trail were not necessarily increasing anymore. The corresponding paper presented at SAT 2018 described the algorithm and provided empirical evidence of its correctness, but a formalization and proofs were missing. Our contribution is to fill this gap. We further generalize the approach, discuss implementation details, and empirically confirm its effectiveness in an independent implementation.