,
Tim Hoffmann
,
Luc Nicolas Spachmann
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Recently, the proof system MICE for the model counting problem #SAT was introduced by Fichte, Hecher and Roland (SAT'22). As demonstrated by Fichte et al., the system MICE can be used for proof logging for state-of-the-art #SAT solvers. We perform a proof-complexity study of MICE. For this we first simplify the rules of MICE and obtain a calculus MICE' that is polynomially equivalent to MICE. Our main result establishes an exponential lower bound for the number of proof steps in MICE' (and hence also in MICE) for a specific family of CNFs.
@InProceedings{beyersdorff_et_al:LIPIcs.SAT.2023.2,
author = {Beyersdorff, Olaf and Hoffmann, Tim and Spachmann, Luc Nicolas},
title = {{Proof Complexity of Propositional Model Counting}},
booktitle = {26th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2023)},
pages = {2:1--2:18},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-286-0},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2023},
volume = {271},
editor = {Mahajan, Meena and Slivovsky, Friedrich},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SAT.2023.2},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-184647},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SAT.2023.2},
annote = {Keywords: model counting, #SAT, proof complexity, proof systems, lower bounds}
}