Last modification: January 30 2004.
Changes compared to the previous competition rules are highlighted in green
A new SAT competition is going to start on February 2004 and continue until May 2004. The results of the competition will be given at the SAT 2004 conference (May 10-13, 2004, Vancouver, Canada). That competition follows the SAT Competition 2002 that ran during the SAT 2002 Symposium (May 6-9, 2002, Cincinatti, Ohio, USA) and the SAT Competition 2003 that ran during the SAT 2003 conference (May 5-8, 2003, S. Margherita Ligure - Portofino, Italy).
There are no restrictions concerning whether this solver is new or old, published or not, took part in other competitions or not. Note that up to three variants (same algorithm, same authors, different parameters) of the same solver can be submitted to the competition but only the best one will be considered for the qualification to the final stage. The solvers awarded at the previous competition will be automatically submitted to the competition in their awarding category.
Laurent Simon and Daniel Le Berre (and possibly system administrators: this is unavoidable!) will be the only person who will have an access to the solvers.
Unlike previous competitions, there won't be any input/output compliance stage this year. Solvers not compliant with the competition input/output framework will simply be excluded from the competition. A set of tools is available to allow you to check that your solver is compliant with our input/output requirement.
We will first run each solver on each applicable benchmark (i.e., we will not run incomplete solvers on the benchmarks known to be unsatisfiable); smaller benchmarks come earlier. If a solver does not answer within time limit (to be determined when we know the number of submissions), it is interrupted. Randomized solvers will be started only one time, but the time out will be given as an environment variable and as a parameter. Thus, submitters of randomized solvers are able to restart their solver as many times they want, but within the same time limit as non randomized solvers.
For the next stage of the competition the competition judges select top N solvers (determined from the first stage by the same method as will be used for determining the winners after the second stage, considering only the best variant of a given solver) in each of the 6 categories and run them on the M smallest unsolved benchmarks (again, separately in each category), smaller benchmarks come earlier. The number of solvers and benchmarks selected in each category may vary.
There will be three categories of solvers: the ones able to answer SAT, the ones able to answer UNSAT, and the ones able to answer SAT and UNSAT. (Clearly, a complete solver can take part in the competition in the three categories). There will be also three categories of benchmarks. Thus, there will be a total of 3*3=9 winners, the same amount of second place winners etc.
However, if a solver solves no (zero) benchmarks for given category, it cannot be declared a winner under any circumstances. Furthermore, if the winner in a category was already awarded for that category in the previous competition, then there will be no award given for that category.
A beautiful certificate, unless some people are willing to provide prizes to motivate the competition (then please contact the organizers).
Winners in each categories will be invited to submit a detailled description of their solver to a journal (to be defined yet) quickly after the end of the competition. For people not willing to do so, the technical report or the source code that was submitted together with the solver will be made available on the competition web site.