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Formally Verifying the Solution to the Boolean Pythagorean Triples Problem

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Abstract

The Boolean Pythagorean Triples problem asks: does there exist a binary coloring of the natural numbers such that every Pythagorean triple contains an element of each color? This problem was first solved in 2016, when Heule, Kullmann and Marek encoded a finite restriction of this problem as a propositional formula and showed its unsatisfiability. In this work we formalize their development in the theorem prover Coq. We state the Boolean Pythagorean Triples problem in Coq, define its encoding as a propositional formula and establish the relation between solutions to the problem and satisfying assignments to the formula. We verify Heule et al.’s proof by showing that the symmetry breaks they introduced to simplify the propositional formula are sound, and by implementing a correct-by-construction checker for proofs of unsatisfiability based on reverse unit propagation.

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Notes

  1. This would require both the SAT solver and the checker to be flawed in a similar way, which is unlikely given that they were developed independently.

  2. The constants and , inhabiting the type , are distinguished in Coq from the singleton type and the empty type , which are logical propositions inhabiting the sort .

  3. Expressing this property as a predicate, rather than as a record type, simplifies our development.

  4. This simple argument was communicated informally by Marijn Heule. To the best of our knowledge, it has not been published elsewhere.

  5. This value was originally chosen because 2520 is the number that occurs most often in the triples after simplification, hence the potential for simplification was highest.

  6. This is a sanity check, but it is nice that we can perform it using certified code.

  7. Practical measurements show that these depths are at most approximately 150, for CNFs containing just under 15,000 clauses. Although this is much higher than for a perfectly balanced tree, it suffices for practical purposes, and allows us to avoid formalizing a balancing algorithm. See [8] for a similar discussion.

  8. Declaring a function of type as a coercion means that Coq applies it automatically whenever it expects a term of type and one of type is given. In order to guarantee termination, no composition of coercions may map a type to itself.

  9. In principle, this approach could break soundness of extraction; we are using the fact that these constructs behave as identities. Targeting a lazy language like Haskell would not require this workaround; however, our experiments showed that using OCaml instead of Haskell reduced computation times to around one-fourth.

  10. The modified version of drat-trim from [9] is slightly slower than the original, due to the need to generate more detailed proofs.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Marijn Heule for providing some valuable insights, namely regarding the mathematical interpretation of the simplification procedure used in [18]. This work was partially supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research, Natural Sciences, Grant DFF-1323-00247.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230, Odense M, Denmark

    Luís Cruz-Filipe & Peter Schneider-Kamp

  2. LaSIGE, Faculty of Science, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Joao Marques-Silva

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  1. Luís Cruz-Filipe
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  2. Joao Marques-Silva
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  3. Peter Schneider-Kamp
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Correspondence to Luís Cruz-Filipe.

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Cruz-Filipe, L., Marques-Silva, J. & Schneider-Kamp, P. Formally Verifying the Solution to the Boolean Pythagorean Triples Problem. J Autom Reasoning 63, 695–722 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10817-018-9490-4

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