| Math Coffee: "Can’t Get No Satisfaction: Exploring patterns in boolean satisfiability" Shashank Suresh ‘12 and Annie Temmink ‘11 |
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When: April 20,
2010
4:00 pm
-
5:00 pm Where:
Chambers 3155
,
Chambers Building
Speaker: Shashank Suresh ‘12 and Annie Temmink ‘11 Ticket Required: No
Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) problems are logic problems whose solutions are used in Internet search algorithms and 3D graphics software. They belong to the set of NP-complete problems, whose solutions are easy to verify, but become combinatorially more time consuming to solve as the size of the problem increases. During the summer of 2009 we worked in an interdisciplinary team of mathematicians and biologists to encode the SAT problem into bacterial computers. We examined small cases of the SAT problem, looking for patterns in hopes of simplifying the processes required to solve them. With the aid of Mathematica, we developed a set of tools and animations to visualize clause satisfiability in order to sort problems by type. With these tools, we constructed a new method for graphically representing 2-SAT and 3-SAT problems. From these visualization tools we formulated a conjecture which may lead to new methods of addressing SAT and more efficient bacterial computers.
This project was also presented as a poster at the
- Annual Math. Assoc. of America Southeastern Section meeting at Elon University, March 2010.
Contact: Prof. Donna Molinek
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