Abstract
Clause learning is a technique used by backtracking-based propositional satis?ability solvers, where some clauses obtained by analysis of con?icts are added to the formula during backtracking. It has been observed empirically that clause learning does not signi?cantly improve the performance of a solver when restricted to learning clauses of small width only. This experience is supported by lower bound theorems. It is shown that lower bounds on the runtime of width-restricted clause learning follow from lower bounds on the width of resolution proofs. This yields the ?rst lower bounds on width-restricted clause learning for formulas in 3-CNF.