Minisat

Minisat is a minimalist, open-source SAT solver for propositional logic. It is written in C++ and designed to be compact, readable, and easy to modify, while implementing modern SAT solving techniques.

Developed by Niklas Een and Niklas Sörensson at Lund University, the project was first released in 2003. It quickly became widely used as a teaching tool and reference implementation, and has influenced many subsequent solvers and research papers.

Technically, Minisat implements a conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) solver with the two-literal watching scheme for efficient propagation. It performs unit propagation, non-chronological backtracking, and clause learning from conflicts. The codebase is intentionally small and well-structured, which makes it approachable for students and researchers to study and extend.

In terms of impact, Minisat has served as the basis for numerous open-source derivatives and has been used in research, education, and industry. It influenced later solvers such as Glucose and other projects, and remains a common starting point for experiments in SAT solving.

Licensing and availability: Minisat is distributed under a permissive open-source license, enabling broad use in both academic and commercial contexts. The project is widely distributed and used as a building block in larger verification and synthesis tools.