I am an academic and I am working on testing SAT algorithms on hard Alloy instances.
For this, I need the CNF file that Alloy is creating from the Alloy model.
I am interested to know how I can retrieve the CNF files from Alloy, and eventually where they are temporarily stored.
Go to the Options menu, change SAT Solver to "CNF".
Then every time you execute a command, it will write the CNF file instead
and it will tell you where the CNF file is stored.
(During normal execution, the CNF is not written to disk,
but it is indeed sent via inter-process pipe directly
into the SAT solver)
If you want the SAT solver to solve the problems for you again,
then you need to change the SAT Solver back. I suggest MiniSat.
Go to the Options menu, change SAT Solver to "CNF".
Then every time you execute a command, it will write the CNF file instead
and it will tell you where the CNF file is stored.
(During normal execution, the CNF is not written to disk,
but it is indeed sent via inter-process pipe directly
into the SAT solver)
If you want the SAT solver to solve the problems for you again,
then you need to change the SAT Solver back. I suggest MiniSat.