I just learned that CDF plots were introduced to SAT around the year 2020. That’s… surprisingly recent!
I always assumed that Cactus and CDF had co-existed for a long time, and that Cactus was more dominant in older papers due to some personal preferences. After all, they are just flipped versions of each other, around the x=y line.
But no, CDFs plots were apparently introduced to the SAT community only in 2020, at the 22:26 minute mark in the PoS 2020 Lightning Talk by Armin Biere. There, he presents this strange new plotting style and argues (in front of a partially sceptical audience) for its adoption. Who would have though that CDF (within the SAT community) is such a new concept.
And where did Cactus plots come from? Apparently, from the 2001 CASC/TPTP Journal Paper from Geoff Sutcliffe, at least according to Daniel Le Berre (settling the debate at minute 26:15). And indeed, in that paper we find exactly one cactus plot:
