On Universal Restart Strategies for Backtracking Search [chapter]

Huayue Wu, Peter van Beek
2007 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
Constraint satisfaction and propositional satisfiability problems are often solved using backtracking search. Previous studies have shown that a technique called randomization and restarts can dramatically improve the performance of a backtracking algorithm on some instances. We consider the commonly occurring scenario where one is to solve an ensemble of instances using a backtracking algorithm and wish to learn a good restart strategy for the ensemble. In contrast to much previous work, our
more » ... cus is on universal strategies. We contribute to the theoretical understanding of universal strategies and demonstrate both analytically and empirically the pitfalls of non-universal strategies. We also propose a simple approach for learning good universal restart strategies and demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach through an extensive empirical evaluation on a real-world testbed.
doi:10.1007/978-3-540-74970-7_48 fatcat:pffay3izerbkzdi6nbus3hx6o4