A Characterisation of First-Order Constraint Satisfaction Problems
Logic in Computer Science
2015-07-01 v2 Computational Complexity
Abstract
We describe simple algebraic and combinatorial characterisations of finite relational core structures admitting finitely many obstructions. As a consequence, we show that it is decidable to determine whether a constraint satisfaction problem is first-order definable: we show the general problem to be NP-complete, and give a polynomial-time algorithm in the case of cores. A slight modification of this algorithm provides, for first-order definable CSP's, a simple poly-time algorithm to produce a solution when one exists. As an application of our algebraic characterisation of first order CSP's, we describe a large family of L-complete CSP's.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0707.2562,
title = {A Characterisation of First-Order Constraint Satisfaction Problems},
author = {Benoit Larose and Cynthia Loten and Claude Tardif},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0707.2562},
year = {2015}
}