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Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence A Flat Histogram Method for Computing the Density of States of Combinatorial Problems ∗
"... Consider a combinatorial state space S, such as the set of all truth assignments to N Boolean variables. Given a partition of S, we consider the problem of estimating the size of all the subsets in which S is divided. This problem, also known as computing the density of states, is quite general and ..."
Abstract
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Consider a combinatorial state space S, such as the set of all truth assignments to N Boolean variables. Given a partition of S, we consider the problem of estimating the size of all the subsets in which S is divided. This problem, also known as computing the density of states, is quite general and has many applications. For instance, if we consider a Boolean formula in CNF and we partition according to the number of violated constraints, computing the density of states is a generalization of both SAT, MAX-SAT and model counting. We propose a novel Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to compute the density of states of Boolean formulas that is based on a flat histogram approach. Our method represents a new approach to a variety of inference, learning, and counting problems. We demonstrate its practical effectiveness by showing that the method converges quickly to an accurate solution on a range of synthetic and real-world instances. 1

