Satisfiability thresholds for regular occupation problems

Abstract In the last two decades the study of random instances of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) has flourished across several disciplines, including computer science, mathematics and physics. The diversity of the developed methods, on the rigorous and non-rigorous side, has led to major advances regarding both the theoretical as well as the applied viewpoints. Based on a ceteris paribus approach in terms of the density evolution equations known from statistical physics, we focus on a specific prominent class of regular CSPs, the so-called occupation problems , and in particular on $r$ -in- $k$ occupation problems. By now, out of these CSPs only the satisfiability threshold – the largest degree for which the problem admits asymptotically a solution – for the $1$ -in- $k$ occupation problem has been rigorously established. Here we determine the satisfiability threshold of the $2$ -in- $k$ occupation problem for all $k$ . In the proof we exploit the connection of an associated optimization problem regarding the overlap of satisfying assignments to a fixed point problem inspired by belief propagation, a message passing algorithm developed for solving such CSPs.