Computational Complexity of SAT, Xsat and Nae-SAT

The Boolean conjunctive normal form (CNF) satisability problem, called SAT for short, gets as input a CNF formula and has to decide whether this formula admits a satisfying truth assignment. As is well known, the remarkable result by S. Cook in 1971 established SAT as the first and genuine complete problem for the complexity class NP. In this thesis we consider SAT for a subclass of CNF, the so called Mixed Horn formula class (MHF). A formula F 2 MHF consists of a 2-CNF part P and a Horn part H. We propose that MHF has a central relevance in CNF because many prominent NP-complete problems, e.g. Feedback Vertex Set, Vertex Cover, Dominating Set and Hitting Set, can easily be encoded as MHF. Furthermore, we show that SAT remains NP-complete for some interesting subclasses of MHF. We also provide algorithms for some of these subclasses solving SAT in a better running time than O(2^0.5284n) which is the best bound for MHF so far. In addition, we investigate the computational complexity of some prominent variants of SAT, namely not-all-equal SAT (NAE-SAT) and exact SAT (XSAT) restricted to the class of linear CNF formulas.