Constraint Satisfaction Problems with Infinite Templates

  • Authors:
  • Manuel Bodirsky

  • Affiliations:
  • École polytechnique, Laboratoire d'informatique (LIX), France

  • Venue:
  • Complexity of Constraints
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Allowing templates with infinite domains greatly expands therange of problems that can be formulated as a non-uniformconstraint satisfaction problem. It turns out that many CSPs overinfinite templates can be formulated with templates that areω-categorical. We survey examples of such problems intemporal and spatial reasoning, infinite-dimensional algebra,acyclic colorings in graph theory, artificial intelligence,phylogenetic reconstruction in computational biology, and treedescriptions in computational linguistics. We then give an introduction to the universal-algebraic approachto infinite-domain constraint satisfaction, and discuss how cores,polymorphism clones, and pseudo-varieties can be used to study thecomputational complexity of CSPs with ω-categoricaltemplates. The theoretical results will be illustrated by examplesfrom the mentioned application areas. We close with a series ofopen problems and promising directions of future research.