The condensation phase transition in the regular $k$-SAT model

Abstract

Much of the recent work on random constraint satisfaction problems has been inspired by ingenious but non-rigorous approaches from physics. The physics predictions typically come in the form of distributional fixed point problems that are intended to mimic Belief Propagation, a message passing algorithm, applied to the random CSP. In this paper we propose a novel method for harnessing Belief Propagation directly to obtain a rigorous proof of such a prediction, namely the existence and location of a condensation phase transition in the random regular $k$-SAT model.