A Complexity Dichotomy in Spatial Reasoning via Ramsey Theory

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Contributors

Abstract

Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) for first-order reducts of finitely bounded homogeneous structures form a large class of computational problems that might exhibit a complexity dichotomy, P versus NP-complete. A powerful method to obtain polynomial-time tractability results for such CSPs is a certain reduction to polynomial-time tractable finite-domain CSPs defined over k-types, for a sufficiently large k. We give sufficient conditions when this method can be applied and apply these conditions to obtain a new complexity dichotomy for CSPs of first-order expansions of the basic relations of the well-studied spatial reasoning formalism RCC5. We also classify which of these CSPs can be expressed in Datalog. Our method relies on Ramsey theory; we prove that RCC5 has a Ramsey order expansion.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number10
Journal ACM transactions on computation theory : TOCT
Volume16
Issue number2
Publication statusPublished - 30 Jun 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85195842336

Keywords

Keywords

  • computational complexity, Constraint satisfaction, model theory, ramsey theory, RCC5, spatial reasoning, universal algebra