Evaluating Instance Generators by Configuration

Sam Bayless, Dave A. D. Tompkins, Holger H. Hoos

Abstract: The propositional satisfiability problem (SAT) is one of the most prominent and widely studied NP-hard problems. The development of SAT solvers, whether it is carried out manually or through the use of automated design tools such as algorithm configurators, depends substantially on the sets of benchmark instances used for performance evaluation. Since the supply of instances from real-world applications of SAT is limited, and artificial instance distributions such as Uniform Random \(k\)-SAT are known to have markedly different structure, there has been a long-standing interest in instance generators capable of producing ‘realistic’ SAT instances that could be used during development as proxies for real-world instances. However, it is not obvious how to assess the quality of the instances produced by any such generator. We propose a new approach for evaluating the usefulness of an arbitrary set of instances for use as proxies during solver development, and introduce a new metric, \(Q\)-score, to quantify this. We apply our approach on several artificially generated and real-world benchmark sets and quantitatively compare their usefulness for developing competitive SAT solvers.