Many aspects of the relation of different decision tree and DNF complexity measures of Boolean functions have been more or less substantially explored. This paper adds a new detail to the picture: we prove that DNF tautologies with terms conflicting in one or two variables pairwise possess a tree-like structure. An equivalent reformulation of this result (adopting the terminology of [7, 8, 9]) ...

We characterize the hitting sets for read-once branching programs of width 3 by a so-called richness condition which is independent of a rather technical definition of branching programs. The richness property proves to be (in certain sense) necessary and sufficient condition for such hitting sets. In particular, we show that any rich set extended with all strings within Hamming distance of 3 i...

We apply our new hitting set enumeration algorithm to solve the sudoku minimum number of clues problem, which is the following question: What is the smallest number of clues (givens) that a sudoku puzzle may have? It was conjectured that the answer is 17. We have performed an exhaustive search for a 16-clue sudoku puzzle, and we did not find one, thereby proving that the answer is indeed 17. Th...

We consider the problem of constructing explicit Hitting sets for Combinatorial Shapes, a class of statistical tests first studied by Gopalan, Meka, Reingold, and Zuckerman (STOC 2011). These generalize many well-studied classes of tests, including symmetric functions and combinatorial rectangles. Generalizing results of Linial, Luby, Saks, and Zuckerman (Combinatorica 1997) and Rabani and Shpi...

Introduction. The Weighted Minimum Hitting Set Problem (WMHSP) and the standard Minimum Hitting Set Problem (MHSP), are combinatorial problems of great interest for many applications. Although, these problems lend themselves quite naturally to an evolutionary approach. To our knowledge, there are no significant results of evolutionary algorithms applied to either the WMHSP or the MHSP, except f...

We apply our new hitting set enumeration algorithm to solve the sudoku minimum number of clues problem, which is the following question: What is the smallest number of clues (givens) that a sudoku puzzle may have? It was conjectured that the answer is 17. We have performed an exhaustive search for a 16-clue sudoku puzzle, and we did not find one, thereby proving that the answer is indeed 17. Th...