as the saying goes in aggieland if you do something once at texas a&m university its a tradition consider another one added to the list now that a trio of texas a&m physicists has taken first place in the incomplete unweighted max-sat random track solvers category of the 2016 satisfiability (sat) competition notching the victory with their first-ever entry into the vaunted annual international contest dr helmut g katzgraber the 2016 sat competition is a competitive event for solvers of the boolean satisfiability (sat) problem in computer science where one attempts to determine whether or not a boolean formula a set of binary variables linked together with boolean operators such as and not and or can be satisfied texas a&ms team composed of physics postdoctoral researcher zheng zhu physics graduate student chao fang and physics professor helmut g katzgraber with input and advice from texas a&m high performance research computings marinus pennings came up with the optimal solution with the best central processing unit (cpu) run time among all max-sat entries their work which is funded in part by the us office of the director of national intelligences intelligence advanced research projects activity (iarpa) is detailed in a recent paper posted to arxiv every year the sat association hosts a competition for the fastest sat solver katzgraber said these are hard computations problems known as constraint satisfaction problems that are relevant all across science and industry basically if you can solve such a problem efficiently you can solve a whole class of problems that can be found all over the place this years sat competition was organized as a satellite event to the 19th international conference on theory and applications of satisfiability testing held july 5-8 in bordeaux france and featuring a variety of tracks including the max-sat solver one won by the texas a&m physics team with its inaugural submission in the history of the overall competition the objective is to gauge current state-of-the-art in the field of sat solvers a method of complex problem-solving that combines high-performance computing with high-end algorithmic developments and to make such benchmark solutions publically available we entered our solver in one track of the competition for the first time and won katzgraber said this is huge because industry in particular is very interested in these algorithms katzgraber said he and his teammates discovered this past spring that the algorithms they commonly use to study complex physics problems might be efficient in solving sat problems after testing and fine tuning they arrived at their eventual top-ranked solution katzgrabers work routinely involves simulations and calculations that require high-end computing capabilities including in this case those encompassed in texas a&m high performance research computings ada cluster (credit: texas a&m high performance research computing) instead of using traditional local search algorithms that work in little corners of solution space we used an algorithm designed to wander around the solution space efficiently katzgraber said this in turn allowed us to find the solutions within record times organized since 2002 the sat competition is widely regarded as the driving force behind the development of sat solvers which are key in many industrial applications including hardware and software verification the sat 2016 website notes that many hard combinatorial problems can be tackled using sat-based techniques including problems that arise in formal verification artificial intelligence operations research computational biology cryptology data mining machine learning and mathematics the theoretical and practical advances in sat research during the past 20 years have contributed to making sat solving technology an indispensable tool in a variety of domains katzgraber says his team plans to submit to more categories for future annual events which he notes are as much about continuing to push the technological envelope as motivating grassroots innovation through friendly competition and the opportunity to compare and contrast ideas and approaches basically if we can solve these hard combinatorial problems efficiently we could for example create efficient probabilistic membership filters that are of keen interest to the us government katzgraber said for additional information on the 2016 sat competition and complete results visit http://balduritikitedu/sat-competition-2016/ # # # # # # # # # # about research at texas a&m university: as one of the worlds leading research institutions texas a&m is at the forefront in making significant contributions to scholarship and discovery including that of science and technology research conducted at texas a&m represented annual expenditures of more than $8666 million in fiscal year 2015 texas a&m ranked in the top 20 of the national science foundations higher education research and development survey (2014) based on expenditures of more than $854 million in fiscal year 2014 texas a&ms research creates new knowledge that provides basic fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many cases in economic benefits to the state nation and world to learn more visit http://researchtamuedu -atm- contact: shana k hutchins (979) 862-1237 or shutchins@sciencetamuedu or dr helmut g katzgraber (979) 845-2590 or hgk@tamuedu