Abstract
The unique satisfiability problem, that asks whether there exists a unique solution to a given propositional formula, was extensively studied in the recent years. This paper presents a dichotomy theorem for the unique satisfiability problem, partitioning the instances of the problem between the polynomial-time solvable and coNP-hard cases. We notice that the additional knowledge of a model makes this problem coNP-complete.We compare the polynomial cases of unique satisfiability to the polynomial cases of the usual satisfiability problem and show that they are incomparable. This difference between the polynomial cases is partially due to the necessity to apply parsimonious reductions among the unique satisfiability problems to preserve the number of solutions. In particular, we notice that the unique not-all-equal satisfiability problem, where we ask whether there is a unique model such that each clause has at least one true literal and one false literal, is solvable in polynomial time.
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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Juban, L. (1999). Dichotomy theorem for the generalized unique satisfiability problem. In: Ciobanu, G., Păun, G. (eds) Fundamentals of Computation Theory. FCT 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1684. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48321-7_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48321-7_27
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