Towards a Complexity-theoretic Understanding of Restarts in SAT solvers

Restarts are a widely used class of techniques integral to the efficiency of Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) SAT solvers. While the utility of such policies has been well-established empirically, until now we didn't have a complexity-theoretic understanding of why restart policies are crucial to the power of CDCL SAT solvers. In this paper, we prove a series of theoretical results that characterize the power of restarts for various models of Boolean SAT solvers. More precisely, we make the following contributions. First, we prove an exponential separation between a drunk randomized CDCL SAT solver model with restarts and the same model without restarts using a family of satisfiable instances we call $Ladder_n$ formulas. Second, we show that the configuration of CDCL SAT solver with VSIDS branching and restarts (with activities erased after restarts) are exponentially more powerful than the same configuration without restarts for a family of unsatisfiable instances. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first such set of separation results involving restarts in the context of SAT solvers. Third, we show that restarts do not add any proof complexity-theoretic power vis-a-vis a variety of models of CDCL and DPLL SAT solvers with non-deterministic static variable selection (branching) and value selection.