Technical Notes on Complexity of the Satisfiability Problem

Abstract

These notes contain, among others, a proof that the average running time of an easy solution to the satisfiability problem for propositional calculus is, under some reasonable assumptions, linear (with constant 2) in the size of the input. Moreover, some suggestions are made about criteria for tractability of complex algorithms. In particular, it is argued that the distribution of probability on the whole input space of an algorithm constitutes an non-negligible factor in estimating whether the algorithm is tractable or not.