Plateaus and Plateau Search in Boolean Satisfiability Problems: When to Give Up Searching and Start

: We empirically investigate the properties of the search space and the behaviorof hill-climbing search for solving hard, random Boolean satisfiability problems. In theseexperiments it was frequently observed that rather than attempting to escape from plateausby extensive search, it was better to completely restart from a new random initial state.The optimum point to terminate search and restart was determined empirically over a rangeof problem sizes and complexities. The growth rate of...