Statistical Methodology for Comparison of SAT Solvers

Evaluating improvements to modern SAT solvers and comparison of two arbitrary solvers is a challenging and important task. Relative performance of two solvers is usually assessed by running them on a set of SAT instances and comparing the number of solved instances and their running time in a straightforward manner. In this paper we point to shortcomings of this approach and advocate more reliable, statistically founded methodologies that could discriminate better between good and bad ideas. We present one such methodology and illustrate its application.