Yes or No, Prove It: SAT and Constraint Solving from Davis-Putnam to the Solvers Inside Package Managers and Chip Verification

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 1h 2m

A fictional package-manager maintainer watches an install hang for forty minutes on a dependency tangle, and a fictional chip verification engineer needs to prove that two versions of a multiplier circuit are identical before tape-out. Both are solving the same problem. From a 1960 paper on theorem proving and a 1971 conference talk that defined NP-completeness, through a 2001 solver called Chaff that made millions of variables routine, to a $100 prize from Ronald Graham paid for a 200-terabyte proof, this is the story of how computers learned to say yes or no, and prove it.

Chapters

00:00:00…