The Complexity of Homomorphism and Constraint Satisfaction Problems Seen from the Other Side

  • Authors:
  • Martin Grohe

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • FOCS '03 Proceedings of the 44th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

We give a complexity theoretic classification of homomorphism problems for graphs and, more generally, relational structures obtained by restricting the left hand side structure in a homomorphism. For every class C of structures, let HOM(C,_) be the problem of deciding whether a given structure A \in C has a homomorphism to a given (arbitrary) structure B. We prove that, under some complexity theoretic assumption from parameterized complexity theory,HOM(C,_) is in polynomial time if, and only if, the cores of all structures in C have bounded tree-width (as long as the structures in C only contain relations of bounded arity).Due to a well known correspondence between homomorphism problems and constraint satisfaction problems, our classification carries over to the latter.