Monthly Archives: April 2016
Protected: Minimum Edge-Cost Flow
Monotone 3-Satisfiability
I told Daniel when he gave me his Monotone Satisfiability reduction that the actual problem mentioned in G&J was Monotone 3-Satisfiability.Ā So he went off and did that reduction too.
The Problem:
Monotone 3 SAT. This is a more restrictive case of Monotone SAT
The Description:
Given an formula of clauses where each clause in
contains all negated or non-negated variables, and each clause
contains at most
variables. Does there exist an assignment of the variables so that
is satisfied?
Example:
the following assignment satisfies :
However:
And the following is in MonotoneĀ 3SAT form:
are both unsatisfiable.
The reduction:
In the following reduction we are given an instance of 3SAT,
. Here each clause is of the form:
where
and each is a literal of the form
.
We use the following construction to build an instance of MonotoneĀ 3 SAT out of the above instance of 3SAT :
In each clause we have at most one literal,
that is not of the same parity as the rest of the literals in the clause. For every such literal, we may preform the following substitution:
this yields a modified clause
.
Now we must be able to guarantee that and
are mapped to opposite truth values, so we introduce the new clause:
and conjunct it onto our old formula
producing a new formula
.
For example:
so we preform the substitution
so and
Now repeating this procedure will result in a new formula: .
We claim logical equivalence between the and
This is semantically intuitive as the
clause requires all substituted literal
in
to take the value opposite of
this was the stipulation for the substitution initially. It is also verifiable by truth table construction for:
:
If there exists a truth assignment that satisfies
, then we may extent this truth assignment to produce
which will satisfy
by letting
for all
and letting
for all
.
Obviously if is satisfiable
must be by the above construction of
. So by the above claim we have that
will satisfy
.
:
Continuing from the above, if we have a truth assignment that satisfies
, then by the claim above it also must satisfy
. And
is a sub-formula of
so any truth assignment that satisfies
must also satisfy
.
(Back to me)
Difficulty: 4, since it’s a little harder than the regular Monotone Sat one.
Protected: Kth Shortest Path
Monotone Satisfiability
This semester I’m doing an independent study with a student, Daniel Thornton, looking at NP-Complete problems.Ā He came up with a reduction for Monotone Satisfiability, and since I hadn’t gotten to that problem yet, I told him if he wrote it up, I’d post it.
So, here it is.Ā Take it away, Daniel!
The Problem: Monotone SAT. This is mentioned in problem LO2 in the book.
The description:
Given an set of clauses where each clause in F contains all negated or non-negated variables, is there an assignment of the variables so that
is satisfied?
Example:
the following assignment satisfies :
The reduction:
In the following reduction we are given an instance of SAT, with the clauses:
. Here each clause is of the form
and each
is a literal of the form
Now we build an instance of Monotone SAT from the instance of SAT given above:
For each we construct two new clauses
andĀ
, such that all elements of
are non-negated literals and all terms in
are negated literals with the addition of the new special term
. Now let us build a new formula
this is our instance of Monotone SAT, clauses are either all non-negated or negated.
:
Notice how we added the extra literal or
to each of the clauses
or
respectfully. Now if there is an assignment that satisfies all of the clauses of
then as only
or
may be satisfied by the appended extra literal, one of the clauses must be satisfied by it’s other literals. These literals are also in
so such an assignment satisfies all
.
:
Using an argument similar to the one above, For to be satisfied there must be at least one literal assignment say
that satisfies each clause
Now
is in either
or
. This implies that at least one of
or
is also satisfied by
, so simply assign the new term
accordingly to satisfy the clause in
not satisfied by
(back to me again)
Difficulty: 3.Ā I like that the reduction involves manipulating the formula, instead of applying logical identities.