The Essentials of the SAT 2003 Competition

The SAT 2003 Competition ran in February – May 2003, in conjunction with SAT’03 (the Sixth Fifth International Symposium on the Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing). One year after the SAT 2002 competition, it was not clear that significant progress could be made in the area in such a little time. The competition was a success – 34 solvers and 993 benchmarks, needing 522 CPU days – with a number of brand new solvers. Several 2003 competitors were even able to solve within 15mn benchmarks remained unsolved within 6 hours by 2002 competitors. We report here the essential results of the competition, interpret and statistically analyse them, and at last provide some suggestions for the future competitions.