A Canonical Generalization of OBDD (arxiv.org)

by luu 14 comments 26 points
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14 comments

[−] mplanchard 32d ago
When I was writing biochemistry papers, it was a rule that you had to introduce the full spelling of a phrase along with the first use of its acronym in the full text. Is that not a thing anymore? This abstract reads like something out of a deep immunology subfield, and the first few paragraphs of the introduction didn’t help me out much either.
[−] fcholf 32d ago
Well that is the norm if you use acronyms that are not well-known for the target audience. The paper you see is a submission to the SAT'26 conference, a conference dedicated to the problem SAT and related questions. For most people there, especially the ones interested in this paper, OBDD (Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams), FPT (Fixed Parameter Tractable), DNNF (Decomposable Negation Normal Form) and CNF (Conjunctive Normal Form) are pretty standard acronyms and you do not redefine them in every paper. Plus, conference format forces you to fit everything in a bounded number of pages, so you have to choose where to save space.

That said, Knowledge Compilation is one of the worst subfield of computer science regarding acronyms, so I understand your feeling...

[−] mplanchard 32d ago
Makes sense, and thank you for the expansions! Makes it easier to look them up
[−] throwaway81523 32d ago
Can someone give a quick explanation of why this is important? It looks interesting but that it would take a lot of background to really understand it.
[−] gignico 32d ago
Positively surprised to see stuff like these on HN first page!

If any author is around, do you have an implementation that can be compared with CUDD and similar BDD libraries?