Susceptibility Propagation for Constraint Satisfaction Problems

We study the susceptibility propagation, a message-passing algorithm to compute correlation functions. It is applied to constraint satisfaction problems and its accuracy is examined. As a heuristic method to find a satisfying assignment, we propose susceptibility-guided decimation where correlations among the variables play an important role. We apply this novel decimation to locked occupation problems, a class of hard constraint satisfaction problems exhibited recently. It is shown that the present method performs better than the standard belief-guided decimation.