README.md

SAT Solver written in Go

go-sat is a pure Go library for solving Boolean satisfiability problems (SAT).

Solving SAT problems is at the core of a number of more difficult higher level problems. From hardware/software verification, scheduling constraints, version resolution, etc. many problems are reduced fully or partially to a SAT problem.

Many existing SAT libraries exist that are efficient and easy to bind to if using cgo is an option for you. This library aims to be a pure Go SAT solver that requires no cgo.

It is highly unlikely that this library will ever be as fast as leading SAT solvers in the field. If you require performance or are solving hard SAT problems, you may want to consider wrapping an existing SAT solver with cgo or via os/exec. However, having a pure Go SAT solver is useful for easy cross-compilation in many real world cases.

Features

The root package is sat which contains the SAT solver itself that can solve a boolean formula.

In addition to the solver, this library contains a number of sub-packages for working with SAT problems and formulas:

• cnf - Data structure to represent and perform operations on a boolean formula in conjunctive normal form.

• dimacs - A parser for the DIMACS CNF format, a widely accepted format for boolean formulas in CNF.

Implementation and Performance

go-sat is a fairly standard CDCL (conflict-driven clause learning) solver. The following ideas are present in go-sat:

• Unit propogation
• Backjumping
• Clause Learning
• Watched Literals

Numerous improvements can easily be made to the solver that aren't yet present: better decision literal selection, clause minimization, restart heuristics, etc.

go-sat is still one or two orders of magnitude slower than leading SAT solvers (such as Minisat, CryptoMinisat, Glucose, MapleSAT, etc.). I'd love to narrow that gap and welcome any contributions towards that.

Installation

go-sat is a standard Go library that can be installed and referenced using standard go get and import paths. For example, the root sat package:

go get github.com/mitchellh/go-sat

Example

Below is a basic example of using go-sat.

Note that the solver itself requires the formula already be in CNF (conjunctive normal form). The solver expects higher level packages to convert high level boolean expressions to this form prior to using the solver.

// Consider the example formula already in CNF.
//
// ( ¬x1 ∨ ¬x3 ∨ ¬x4 ) ∧ ( x2 ∨ x3 ∨ ¬x4 ) ∧
// ( x1 ∨ ¬x2 ∨ x4 ) ∧ ( x1 ∨ x3 ∨ x4 ) ∧ ( ¬x1 ∨ x2 ∨ ¬x3 )
// (¬x4)

// Represent each variable as an int where a negative value means negated
formula := cnf.NewFormulaFromInts([][]int{
	[]int{-1, -3, -4},
	[]int{2, 3, -4},
	[]int{1, -2, 4},
	[]int{1, 3, 4},
	[]int{-1, 2, -3},
	[]int{-4},
})

// Create a solver and add the formulas to solve
s := sat.New()
s.AddFormula(formula)

// For low level details on how a solution came to be:
// s.Trace = true
// s.Tracer = log.New(os.Stderr, "", log.LstdFlags)

// Solve it!
sat := s.Solve()

// Solution can be read from Assignments. The key is the variable
// (always positive) and the value is the value.
solution := s.Assignments()

fmt.Printf("Solved: %v\n", sat)
fmt.Printf("Solution:\n")
fmt.Printf("  x1 = %v\n", solution[1])
fmt.Printf("  x2 = %v\n", solution[2])
fmt.Printf("  x3 = %v\n", solution[3])
fmt.Printf("  x4 = %v\n", solution[4])
// Output:
// Solved: true
// Solution:
//   x1 = true
//   x2 = true
//   x3 = true
//   x4 = false

Issues and Contributing

If you find an issue with this library, please report an issue. If you'd like, we welcome any contributions. Fork this library and submit a pull request.

SAT solving is an intensely competitive and fast-moving area of research. As advancements are made, I welcome any contributions or recommendations to improve this solver.

Thanks

Thanks to Minisat for providing understandable and efficient implementations of SAT solving concepts. go-sat translates many of their data representations and algorithms directly due to the clarity of their implementation.

Beyond Minisat, the SAT community is extremely active and filled with a large array of interesting research papers. Thanks to the authors of those papers for making your research public and the relentless dedication of many to improve SAT solving.

I merely stood on the shoulders of prior work to implement a solver in Go, and claim no credit for any ideas here.