Problems of Reducing the Exhaustive Search

Book excerpt: This collection contains translations of papers on propositional satisfiability and related logical problems which appeared in roblemy Sokrashcheniya Perebora, published in Russian in 1987 by the Scientific Council "Cybernetics" of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The problems form the nucleus of this intensively developing area. This translation is dedicated to the memory of two remarkable Russian mathematicians, Sergei Maslov and his wife Nina Maslova. Maslov is known as the originator of the universe method in automated deduction, which was discovered at the same time as the resolution method of J. A. Robison and has approximately the same range of applications. In 1981, Maslov proposed an iterative algorithm for propositional satisfiability based on some general ideas of search described in detail in his posthumously published book, Theory of Deductive Systems and Its Applications (1986; English 1987). This collection contains translations of papers on propositional satisfiability and related logical problems. The papers related to Maslov's iterative method of search reduction play a significant role.