Fifty-Five Solvers in Vancouver: The SAT 2004 Competition

For the third consecutive year, a SAT competition was organized as a joint event with the SAT conference. With 55 solvers from 25 author groups, the competition was a clear success. One of the noticeable facts from the 2004 competition is the superiority of incomplete solvers on satisfiable random k-SAT benchmarks. It can also be pointed out that the complete solvers awarded this year, namely Zchaff, jerusat1.3, satzoo-1.02, kncfsand march-eq, participated in the SAT 2003 competition (or at least former versions of those solvers). This paper is not reporting exhaustive competition results, already available in details online, but rather focuses on some remarkable results derived from the competition dataset. The SAT 2004 competition is ending a 3-year take-off period that attracted new SAT researchers and provided many new benchmarks and solvers to the community. The good participation rate of this year (despite the addition of the anti-blackbox rule) establishes the competition as an awaited yearly event. Some new directions for a new way of thinking about the competition are discussed at the end of the paper.