Abstract
We study the computational complexity of binary valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSP) given by allowing only certain types of costs in every triangle of variable-value assignments to three distinct variables. We show that for several computational problems, including CSP, Max-CSP, finite-valued VCSP, and general-valued VCSP, the only non-trivial tractable classes are the well known maximum matching problem and the recently discovered joint-winner property [9].
Martin Cooper is supported by ANR Projects ANR-10-BLAN-0210 and ANR-10-BLAN-0214. Stanislav Živný is supported by a Junior Research Fellowship at University College, Oxford.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bertelé, U., Brioshi, F.: Nonserial dynamic programming. Academic Press, London (1972)
Bistarelli, S., Montanari, U., Rossi, F.: Semiring-based Constraint Satisfaction and Optimisation. Journal of the ACM 44(2), 201–236 (1997)
Bulatov, A., Krokhin, A., Jeavons, P.: Classifying the Complexity of Constraints using Finite Algebras. SIAM Journal on Computing 34(3), 720–742 (2005)
Cohen, D.A., Cooper, M.C., Jeavons, P.G.: Generalising submodularity and Horn clauses: Tractable optimization problems defined by tournament pair multimorphisms. Theoretical Computer Science 401(1-3), 36–51 (2008)
Cohen, D.A., Cooper, M.C., Jeavons, P.G., Krokhin, A.A.: The Complexity of Soft Constraint Satisfaction. Artificial Intelligence 170(11), 983–1016 (2006)
Cohen, D., Jeavons, P.: The complexity of constraint languages. In: Rossi, F., van Beek, P., Walsh, T. (eds.) The Handbook of Constraint Programming. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2006)
Cohen, D.A.: A New Class of Binary CSPs for which Arc-Constistency Is a Decision Procedure. In: Rossi, F. (ed.) CP 2003. LNCS, vol. 2833, pp. 807–811. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Cooper, M.C., Jeavons, P.G., Salamon, A.Z.: Generalizing constraint satisfaction on trees: hybrid tractability and variable elimination. Artificial Intelligence 174(9-10), 570–584 (2010)
Cooper, M.C., Živný, S.: Hybrid tractability of valued constraint problems. Artificial Intelligence 175(9-10), 1555–1569 (2011)
Cooper, M.C., Živný, S.: Hierarchically nested convex VCSP. In: Lee, J. (ed.) CP 2011. LNCS, vol. 6876, pp. 187–194. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Creignou, N., Khanna, S., Sudan, M.: Complexity Classification of Boolean Constraint Satisfaction Problems. SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications, vol. 7. SIAM, Philadelphia (2001)
Dechter, R.: Constraint Processing. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2003)
Dechter, R., Pearl, J.: Network-based Heuristics for Constraint Satisfaction Problems. Artificial Intelligence 34(1), 1–38 (1988)
Downey, R., Fellows, M.: Parametrized Complexity. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Edmonds, J.: Paths, trees, and flowers. Canadian Journal of Mathematics 17, 449–467 (1965)
Feder, T., Vardi, M.: The Computational Structure of Monotone Monadic SNP and Constraint Satisfaction: A Study through Datalog and Group Theory. SIAM Journal on Computing 28(1), 57–104 (1998)
Garey, M., Johnson, D.: Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness. W.H. Freeman, New York (1979)
Goodman, A.W.: On Sets of Acquaintances and Strangers at any Party. The American Mathematical Monthly 66(9), 778–783 (1959)
Grohe, M.: The complexity of homomorphism and constraint satisfaction problems seen from the other side. Journal of the ACM 54(1), 1–24 (2007)
Jeavons, P.: On the Algebraic Structure of Combinatorial Problems. Theoretical Computer Science 200(1-2), 185–204 (1998)
Kolmogorov, V., Živný, S.: Generalising tractable VCSPs defined by symmetric tournament pair multimorphisms. Tech. rep. (August 2010)
Kolmogorov, V., Živný, S.: The complexity of conservative VCSPs (submitted for publication, 2011)
Lewis, J.M., Yannakakis, M.: The node-deletion problem for hereditary properties is NP-complete. Journal of Computer System Sciences 20(2), 219–230 (1980)
Lovász, L.: Coverings and colorings of hypergraphs. In: Proceedings of the 4th Southeastern Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, pp. 3–12 (1973)
Maffray, F., Preissmann, M.: On the NP-completeness of the k-colorability problem for triangle-free graphs. Discrete Mathematics 162(1-3), 313–317 (1996)
Papadimitriou, C.: Computational Complexity. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1994)
Rossi, F., van Beek, P., Walsh, T. (eds.): The Handbook of Constraint Programming. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2006)
Schaefer, T.: The Complexity of Satisfiability Problems. In: Proceedings of the 10th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 1978), pp. 216–226 (1978)
Schiex, T., Fargier, H., Verfaillie, G.: Valued Constraint Satisfaction Problems: Hard and Easy Problems. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 1995 (1995)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cooper, M.C., Živný, S. (2011). Tractable Triangles. In: Lee, J. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming – CP 2011. CP 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6876. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23786-7_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23786-7_17
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23785-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23786-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)