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Exact 3-satisfiability is decidable in time O(20.16254n)

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Abstract

Let F = C 1 ∧ ⋯ ∧ C m be a Boolean formula in conjunctive normal form over a set V of n propositional variables, s.t. each clause C i contains at most three literals l over V. Solving the problem exact 3-satisfiability (X3SAT) for F means to decide whether there is a truth assignment setting exactly one literal in each clause of F to true (1). As is well known X3SAT is NP-complete [6]. By exploiting a perfect matching reduction we prove that X3SAT is deterministically decidable in time O(20.18674n). Thereby we improve a result in [2,3] stating X3SAT ∈ O(20.2072n) and a bound of O(20.200002n) for the corresponding enumeration problem #X3SAT stated in a preprint [1]. After that by a more involved deterministic case analysis we are able to show that X3SAT ∈ O(20.16254n).

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References

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An extended abstract of this paper was presented at the Fifth International Symposium on the Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2002).

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Porschen, S., Randerath, B. & Speckenmeyer, E. Exact 3-satisfiability is decidable in time O(20.16254n). Ann Math Artif Intell 43, 173–193 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10472-005-0428-2

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