Shared Concepts

Determinism means that running a solver twice on the same machine, with the same set of options and the same version of SAS, yields the same solution. Some SAS Optimization solvers have a DETERMINISTIC= option to control this behavior. If you specify the DETERMINISTIC=TRUE option, or if the DETERMINISTIC= option is not available in the solver, determinism is guaranteed unless you specify the MAXTIME= option. Techniques outside of SAS Optimization that are based on quantum computing and artificial intelligence do not guarantee determinism; they can return a different solution for each run, making their behavior nondeterministic. However, changing the options or the machine or the SAS version is not guaranteed to return the same solution by the solver.