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Backdoors to q-Horn

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Abstract

The class \(\text {q-Horn}\), introduced by Boros, Crama and Hammer in 1990, is one of the largest known classes of propositional CNF formulas for which satisfiability can be decided in polynomial time. This class properly contains the fundamental classes of Horn and 2-CNF formulas as well as the class of renamable (or disguised) Horn formulas. In this paper we extend this class so that its favorable algorithmic properties can be made accessible to formulas that are outside but “close” to this class. We show that deciding satisfiability is fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by the distance of the given formula from \(\text {q-Horn}\). The distance is measured by the smallest number of variables that we need to delete from the formula in order to get a \(\text {q-Horn}\) formula, i.e., the size of a smallest deletion backdoor set into the class \(\text {q-Horn}\). This result generalizes known fixed-parameter tractability results for satisfiability decision with respect to the parameters distance from Horn, 2-CNF, and renamable Horn.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge support from the OeAD (Austrian Indian collaboration grant, IN13/2011). Serge Gaspers, Sebastian Ordyniak, and Stefan Szeider acknowledge support from the European Research Council (COMPLEX REASON, 239962) and Serge Gaspers acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council (DE120101761).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    Serge Gaspers

  2. National ICT Australia, Sydney, Australia

    Serge Gaspers

  3. Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Sebastian Ordyniak

  4. The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India

    M. S. Ramanujan & Saket Saurabh

  5. Institute of Information Systems, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Stefan Szeider

Authors
  1. Serge Gaspers
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  2. Sebastian Ordyniak
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  3. M. S. Ramanujan
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  4. Saket Saurabh
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  5. Stefan Szeider
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to M. S. Ramanujan.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the proceedings of STACS 2013.

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Gaspers, S., Ordyniak, S., Ramanujan, M.S. et al. Backdoors to q-Horn. Algorithmica 74, 540–557 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-014-9958-5

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