SAT Workshop at the Simons Institute, Berkeley

I attended the reunion at the Simons Institute, which followed the virtual semester last year. The meeting was in Berkeley (fun to discover SF!). I presented an unpublished work on restarts with many questions and so few answers, as you can read on my main slide for my presentation.

Abstract of my presentation: Despite the importance of restart strategies in modern SAT solvers, even simple questions about when to restart and why we should restart is known. For instance, the fact that the Luby restart strategy is still very successful only states that we are blindly firing restarts. A few informed strategies have been proposed but there are no (experimentally stong) explanations of their success. In this presentation, we present a costly but funny experimental study of what restart strategies can and should do to help the search. We will uncover some surprising results.