A good guide (in my experience) -- with SAT while the answer is hard to find it's easy to check (like a Sudoku, or building a timetable with no clashes), while ANN give answers where verifying the answer isn't easy to perform computstionally (if I give you a translation of a text into Latin, verifying it is about as hard as just making a new one from scratch)
How could a SAT/SMT help me in this task? I know it's already used for math theorem checking.
E.g All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrate is mortal. I have currently two way to solve syllogisms
One hard-coded Disjonction of cases (but not flexible enough for non canonical forms of syllogisms)
And a flexible one that generate a graph of transitivity.
Both are 100% accurate.
Could SAT/SMT give me a third way of determining if the conclusion is logically valid? (not non sequitur)
SMT is some extra stuff on top of SAT. There are a few frameworks which extend SAT. I'd look at minizinc, it is a fairly easy to use language which can produce SAT (and SMT, and others) as output. Often encoding things in SAT directly gets arkward.
System description: Transition system like automata or a guarded command language which induces a graph.
System Property: Stated in some logic, CTL/LTL
Output: Satisfied, or Unsatisfied with a counter example (usually a path in the graph which is false).
If your problem can fit into such a framework, have a look at model checkers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_model_checking_tools
SAT solvers work out if it is possible to satisfy a logical model (hence the name).
In theory a neural network could approximate a function that solves SAT. In practice it is a much better idea to use a SAT solver. Neural networks aren't that powerful at solving logic puzzles.
One is heuristic vs algorithm. If SAT solver finds a solution, it's correct. If ANN finds a solution, it might be correct.
ANN is suitable for pattern recognition, statistical learning and representation learning. Learning continuous functions for example. SAT solvers work best for discrete problems.
But deep learning neural network are also said to be used when there's no good solution known.
It's the first time I see the symmetry. When should I use a SAT vs an ANN?
Other than SAT and ANN, are there other kind or technology that automatically solve/approximate solutions?