A New Structural Property of SAT

Abstract: We review a minimum set of notions from our previous paper on structural properties of SAT at arXiv:0802.1790 that will allow us to define and discuss the "complete internal independence" of a decision problem. This property is strictly stronger than the independence property that was called "strong internal independence" in cited paper. We show that SAT exhibits this property. We argue that this form of independence of a decision problem is the strongest possible for a problem. By relying upon this maximally strong form of internal independence, we reformulate in more strict terms the informal remarks on possible exponentiality of SAT that concluded our previous paper. The net result of that reformulation is a hint for a proof for SAT being exponential. We conjecture that a complete proof of that proposition can be obtained by strictly following the line of given hint of proof.