A General Upper Bound for the Satisfiability Threshold of Randomr-SAT Formulae

Experiments on solvingr-SAT random formulae have provided evidence of a satisfiability threshold phenomenon with respect to the ratio of the number of clauses to the number of variables of formulae. Presently, only the threshold of 2-SAT formulae has been proved to exist and has been computed to be equal to 1. For 3-SAT formulae and more generally forr-SAT formulae, lower and upper bounds of the threshold have been established. The best established bounds concern 3-SAT. For an observed threshold of about 4.25, the best lower bound is 3.003 and the best upper bound 4.76. In this paper we establish a general upper bound of the threshold forr-SAT formulae giving a value for 3-SAT of 4.64, significantly improving the previous best upper bound. For this we have defined a more restrictive structure than a satisfying truth assignment for characterizing the satisfiability of a SAT formula which we have called negatively prime solution (NPS). By merely applying the first moment method to negatively prime solutions of a randomr-SAT formula we obtain our bound.