What's Hard About Boolean Functional Synthesis?

Given a relational specification between Boolean inputs and outputs, the goal of Boolean functional synthesis is to synthesize each output as a function of the inputs such that the specification is met. In this paper, we first show that unless some hard conjectures in complexity theory are falsified, Boolean functional synthesis must generate large Skolem functions in the worst-case. Given this inherent hardness, what does one do to solve the problem? We present a two-phase algorithm, where the first phase is efficient both in terms of time and size of synthesized functions, and solves a large fraction of benchmarks. To explain this surprisingly good performance, we provide a sufficient condition under which the first phase must produce correct answers. When this condition fails, the second phase builds upon the result of the first phase, possibly requiring exponential time and generating exponential-sized functions in the worst-case. Detailed experimental evaluation shows our algorithm to perform better than other techniques for a large number of benchmarks.