Lately, I have been having a poll of who will win the SAT Race’10. Apparently, 5 people voted until now, me included. I voted PrecoSat. Not because I didn’t want to vote CryptoMiniSat, but because I honestly believe it really will win. The reason is awfully simple: Armin Biere, the (main) author of PrecoSat has had far more experience and time than me to perfect his solver. This is normal, though I only hope he might notice the amount of effort that was put into CryptoMiniSat.

CryptoMiniSat now contains ~10’000 lines of code, compared to the original so-called ‘core’ MiniSat it has been developed from, which contained ~1’000. A ten-fold increase in code, which represents more than 1300 commits in the main tree (and about 1.5 years of my life). This effort has not been carried out alone. Though I haven’t much talked about people that helped me on the way, CryptoMiniSat has been tested and patches have been committed by a number of people, putting a lot of their time and effort into making a working SAT solver. They all worked just for the fun of being part of the project.

The collaborative nature of the CryptoMiniSat project is partially the reason why, I hope, it might succeed in the end in becoming a viable alternative to PrecoSat. End of next week, I will post the whole revision history of CryptoMiniSat to Gitorious, so everyone can see how certain options evolved over time — my commit messages are usually (overly) long ;) Then, bugzilla, mailing lists, forums and the rest will hopefully garner some steam, and we can start rolling. The road is wide ahead…