A relational structure is a core, if all its endomorphisms are embeddings. This notion is important for the classification for the computational complexity of constraint satisfaction problems. It is a fundamental fact that every finite structure S has a core, i.e., S has an endomorphism e such that the structure induced by e(S) is a core; moreover, the core is unique up to isomorphism.
We prove that this result remains valid for countably categorical structures, and prove that every countably categorical structure has a core, which is unique up to isomorphism, and which is again countably categorical. We thus reduced the classification for the complexity of constraint satisfaction problems with countably categorical templates to the classifiaction for constraint satisfaction problems where the templates are countably categorical cores. We also show that a core of a countably categorical structure Gamma is model complete, and therefore universal-existential axiomatizable. If Gamma contains all primitive positive definable relations, then the core of Gamma admits quantifier elimination. We discuss consequences for constraint satisfaction with countably categorical templates.
Dominance constraints are logical descriptions of trees. Efficient algorithms for the subclass of normal dominance constraints were recently proposed. We present a new and simpler graph algorithm solving these constraints more efficiently, in quadratic time per solved form. It also applies to weakly normal dominance constraints as needed for an application to computational linguistics. Subquadratic running time can be achieved employing decremental graph biconnectivity algorithms.
An instance of a constraint satisfaction problem is k-consistent if any k constraints of it can be simultaneously satisfied. We focus on constraint languages with a single binary constraint. In this case, the constraint satisfaction problem is equivalent to the question whether there is a homomorphism from an input digraph G to a fixed target digraph H. The instance corresponding to G is k-consistent if every subgraph of G of size at most k is homomorphic to H. Let r_k(H) be the largest r such that every k-consistent G contains a subgraph G' of size at least r ||E(G)|| that is homomorphic to H. The ratio r_k(H) reflects the fraction of constraints of a k-consistent instance that can be always satisfied. We determine r_k(H) for all digraphs H that are not acyclic and show that lim r_k(H)=1 for k tending to infinity if H has tree duality. For the latter case we design an efficient algorithm that computes in linear time for a given input graph G and epsilon>0 either a homomorphism from almost the entire graph G to H or a subgraph of G of bounded size that is not homomorphic to H.
Many constraint satisfaction problems have a natural formulation as a homomorphism problem. For a fixed relational structure Gamma we consider the following computational problem: Given a structure S with the same relational signature as Gamma, is there a homomorphism from S to Gamma? This problem is known as the constraint satisfaction problem CSP(Gamma) for the so-called template Gamma and is intensively studied for relational structures Gamma with a finite domain. However, many constraint satisfaction problems can not be formulated with a finite template.
If we allow arbitrary infinite templates, constraint satisfaction is very expressive. We show that it contains undecidable problems, even if the constraint language is binary. In general, a computational problem can be described as the constraint satisfaction problem of an infinite template if and only if it is closed under inverse homomorphisms and disjoint unions. It is also easy to see that we can restrict our attention to countable templates.
In this thesis we study the computational complexity of constraint satisfaction with templates that are omega-categorical. A structure Gamma is omega-categorical if all countable models of the first-order theory of Gamma are isomorphic to Gamma. This concept is central and well-studied in model-theory. On the one hand, omega-categoricity is a rather strong model-theoretic assumption on a relational structure, and we can use them to show that many techniques for constraint satisfaction with finite templates extend to omega-categorical templates.
We investigate properties of a certain countably infinite graph called the
infinite locally random graph, written R_N. The graph R_N arises in the study
of models for massive, self-organizing networks like the web-graph. We
characterize the isomorphism type of R_N as the limit of a random process, and
via a domination elimination ordering. We prove that R_N satisfies vertex
deletion properties generalizing inexhaustibility. As is the case for the
infinite random graph R, R_N has a universal automorphism group and
endomorphism monoid. Unlike R, R_N isometrically embeds all finite graphs.