The SAT Phase Transition

Abstract

Phase transition is an important feature of SAT problem. For random k-SAT model, it is proved that as r (ratio of clauses to variables) increases, the structure of solutions will undergo a sudden change like satisfiability phase transition when r reaches a threshold point. This phenomenon shows that the satisfying truth assignments suddenly shift from being relatively different from each other to being very similar to each other.

13 pages, 3 figures