SAT Competition 2002: Benchmark Submission Guidelines
Submission format
The submission can be a set of instances or a generator of instances. The
set of instances should be representative of the problem to be solved at
various scale. Generators should provide some parameters to scale the instances.
Generator format
The generator is a program to be launched on a Linux environment with some
scaling parameters and a random seed if applicable. (for instance, a random
3-SAT generator will have two scaling parameters (nbvar,nbclauses) and a
random seed parameter). It will output the instance on the standard output,
using the file format below. The command line parameters will appear in the
first commented lines of the instance.
File format
The benchmark file format will be in a simplified version of the DIMACS
format:
c
c start with comments
c
c
p cnf 5 3
1 -5 4 0
-1 5 3 4 0
-3 -4 0
- The file can start with comments, that is lines begining with the character
c.
- Right after the comments, there is the line p cnf nbvar nbclauses indicating
that the instance is in CNF format; nbvar is an upper bound on the largest
index of a variable appearing in the file; nbclauses is the exact number
of clauses contained in the file.
- Then the clauses follow. Each clause is a sequence of distinct non-null
numbers between -nbvar and nbvar ending with 0 on the same line; it cannot
contain the opposite literals i and -i simultaneously. Positive numbers denote
the corresponding variables. Negative numbers denote the negations of the
corresponding variables.
Categories
The benchmarks will be submitted in one of the following categories:
- Random
- Hand-Made (crafted)
- Applications
Each instance should be submitted as SATISFIABLE, UNSATISFIABLE or UNKNOWN.
Random
This category will include usual random 3-SAT, backbone controlled, etc.
Only generator submissions are allowed here. Any generator must be able to
produce many essentially different benchmarks for the same scaling parameters
(given a different random seed).
Hand Made (crafted)
The benchmarks especially made to give a hard time to the solver. There
will be an award for the smallest instance that cannot be solved by any
solver.
Both instances or instance generators can be submitted. Here, no UNKNOWN
instances. For both satisfiable and unsatisfiable instances, a proof must
be submitted (e.g., a reference to a paper where the corresponding theorem
is proved).
Applications
Here we should find instances from various applications, such as model checking,
planning, encryption, etc.
These are series of instances, but NOT generators. The instances here
must encode REAL problems.