On the Hardness of SAT with Community Structure

Recent attempts to explain the effectiveness of Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solvers based on conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) on large industrial benchmarks have focused on the concept of community structure. Specifically, industrial benchmarks have been empirically found to have good community structure, and experiments seem to show a correlation between such structure and the efficiency of CDCL. However, in this paper we establish hardness results suggesting that community structure is not sufficient to explain the success of CDCL in practice. First, we formally characterize a property shared by a wide class of metrics capturing community structure, including “modularity”. Next, we show that the SAT instances with good community structure according to any metric with this property are still NP-hard. Finally, we study a class of random instances generated from the“pseudo-industrial” community attachment model of Giráldez-Cru and Levy. We prove that, with high probability, instances from this model that have relatively few communities but are still highly modular require exponentially long resolution proofs and so are hard for CDCL. We also present experimental evidence that our result continues to hold for instances with many more communities. This indicates that actual industrial instances easily solved by CDCL may have some other relevant structure not captured by the community attachment model.