Towards an understanding of hill-climbing procedures for sat

Recently several local hill-climbing procedures for propositional satis-ability have been proposed, which are able to solve large and dicult problems beyond the reach of conventional algorithms like Davis-Putnam. By the introduction of some new variants of these procedures, we provide strong experimental evidence to support the conjecture that neither greed-iness nor randomness is important in these procedures. One of the variants introduced seems to oer signicant improvements over earlier procedures. In addition, we investigate experimentally how their performance depends on their parameters. Our results suggest that run-time scales less than simply exponentially in the problem size.