Espresso
The heuristic logic minimizer from UC Berkeley that industry tools grew out of — the real program, running in your browser. Use it to check your answers, and to see how a fast heuristic compares with the exact methods.
What Espresso does
The exact methods on this site find every prime implicant and then solve a covering problem. Both steps can blow up: a function of 20 inputs can have millions of prime implicants. Espresso never lists them. It starts from any cover and improves it in a loop: expand each term as far as it will go, throw away terms that have become redundant, reduce the rest so they can expand in a different direction, and repeat until nothing gets better. The answer is always correct and almost always minimal or close to it — but it is not guaranteed minimal, which is the price of being fast. With several outputs it minimizes them together, so product terms are shared, as in lesson 8.
Espresso is © 1988, 1989 Regents of the University of California; it is used here unmodified, compiled to WebAssembly. Copyright notice.