Improving Implementation of SLS Solvers for SAT and New Heuristics for k-SAT with Long Clauses

Stochastic Local Search (SLS) solvers are considered one of the best solving technique for randomly generated problems and more recently also have shown great promise for several types of hard combinatorial problems. Within this work, we provide a thorough analysis of different implementation variants of SLS solvers on random and on hard combinatorial problems. By analyzing existing SLS implementations, we are able to discover new improvements inspired by CDCL solvers, which can speed up the search of all types of SLS solvers. Further, our analysis reveals that the multilevel break values of variables can be easily computed and used within the decision heuristic. By augmenting the probSAT solver with the new heuristic, we are able to reach new state-of-the-art performance on several types of SAT problems, especially on those with long clauses. We further provide a detailed analysis of the clause selection policy used in focused search SLS solvers.