Widely distributed clusters of the constraint satisfaction problem model d-k-CSP

Abstract

Relation between problem hardness and solution space structure is an important research aspect. Model d-k-CSP generates very hard instances when $r=1$ and $r$ is near 1, where $r$ represents normalized constraint density. We find that when $r$ is below and close to 1, the solution space contains many widely distributed well-separated small cluster-regions (a cluster-region is a union of some clusters), which should the reason that the generated instances are hard to solve.