Abstract
We show that every NP problem is polynomially equivalent to a simple combinatorial problem: the membership problem for a special class of digraphs. These classes are defined by means of shadows (projections) and by finitely many forbidden colored (lifted) subgraphs. Our characterization is motivated by the analysis of syntactical subclasses with the full computational power of NP, which were first studied by Feder and Vardi.
Our approach applies to many combinatorial problems and it induces the characterization of coloring problems (CSP) defined by means of shadows. This turns out to be related to homomorphism dualities. We prove that a class of digraphs (relational structures) defined by finitely many forbidden colored subgraphs (i.e. lifted substructures) is a CSP class if and only if all the the forbidden structures are homomorphically equivalent to trees. We show a surprising richness of coloring problems when restricted to most frequent graph classes. Using results of Nešetřil and Ossona de Mendez for bounded expansion classes (which include bounded degree and proper minor closed classes) we prove that the restriction of every class defined as the shadow of finitely many colored subgraphs equals to the restriction of a coloring (CSP) class.
Part of this work was supported by ITI and DIMATIA of Charles University Prague under grant 1M0021620808, by OTKA Grant no. T043671, NK 67867, by NKTH (National Office for Research and Technology, Hungary), AEOLUS and also by Isaac Newton Institute (INI) Cambridge.
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
Atserias, A.: On Digraph Coloring Problems and Treewidth Duality. In: 20th IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS), pp. 106–115 (2005)
Atserias, A., Dawar, A., Kolaitis, P.G.: On Preservation under Homomorphisms and Conjunctive Queries. Journal of the ACM 53(2), 208–237 (2006)
Erdős, P., Füredi, Z., Hajnal, A., Komjáth, P., Rödl, V., Seress, Á.: Coloring graphs with locally few colors. Discrete Math 59, 21–34 (1986)
Fagin, R.: Generalized first-order spectra and polynomial-time recognizable sets. In: Karp, R. (ed.) Complexity of Computation, SIAM-AMS Proceedings, vol. 7, pp. 43–73 (1974)
Feder, T., Vardi, M.: The computational structure of monotone monadic SNP and constraint satisfaction: A study through Datalog and group theory. SIAM J. Comput. 28(1), 57–104 (1999)
Foniok, J., Nešetřil, J., Tardif, C.: Generalized dualities and maximal finite antichains in the homomorphism order of relational structures. In: KAM-DIMATIA Series 2006-766 (to appear in European J. Comb.)
Gács, P., Lovász, L.: Some remarks on generalized spectra. Z. Math. Log. Grdl. 23(6), 547–554 (1977)
Feder, T., Hell, P., Klein, S., Motwani, R.: Complexity of graph partition problems. In: 31st Annual ACM STOC, pp. 464–472 (1999)
Hell, P., Nešetřil, J.: Graphs and Homomorphism. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2004)
Immerman, N.: Languages that capture complexity classes. SIAM J. Comput. 16, 760–778 (1987)
Kun, G.: On the complexity of Constraint Satisfaction Problem, PhD thesis (in Hungarian) (2006)
Kun, G.: Constraints, MMSNP and expander structures, Combinatorica (submitted, 2007)
Kun, G., Nešetřil, J.: Forbidden lifts (NP and CSP for combinatorists). In: KAM-DIMATIA Series 2006-775 (to appear in European J. Comb.)
Ladner, R.E.: On the structure of Polynomial Time Reducibility. Journal of the ACM 22(1), 155–171 (1975)
Luczak, T., Nešetřil, J.: A probabilistic approach to the dichotomy problem. SIAM J. Comp. 36(3), 835–843 (2006)
Madelaine, F.: Constraint satisfaction problems and related logic, PhD thesis (2003)
Madelaine, F., Stewart, I.A.: Constraint satisfaction problems and related logic, (manuscript, 2005)
Matoušek, J., Nešetřil, J.: Constructions of sparse graphs with given homomorphisms (to appear)
Nešetřil, J., Pultr, A.: On classes of relations and graphs determined by subobjects and factorobjects. Discrete Math. 22, 287–300 (1978)
Nešetřil, J., de Mendez, P.O.: Low tree-width decompositions and algorithmic consequences. In: STOC 2006, Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pp. 391–400. ACM Press, New York (2006)
Nešetřil, J., de Mendez, P.O.: Grad and Classes with bounded expansion III. - Restricted Dualities, KAM-DIMATIA Series 2005-741 (to appear in European J. Comb.)
Nešetřil, J., Rödl, V.: Chromatically optimal rigid graphs. J. Comb. Th. B 46, 133–141 (1989)
Nešetřil, J., Tardif, C.: Duality theorems for finite structures (characterising gaps and good characterization. J. Combin. Theory B 80, 80–97 (2000)
Nešetřil, J., Zhu, X.: On sparse graphs with given colorings and homomorphisms. J. Comb. Th. B 90(1), 161–172 (2004)
Rossman, B.: Existential positive types and preservation under homomorphisms. In: 20th IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2005), pp. 467–476 (2005)
Simonyi, G., Tardos, G.: Local chromatic number, Ky Fan’s theorem and circular colorings. Combinatorica 26, 589–626 (2006)
Vardi, M.Y.: The complexity of relational query languages. In: Proceedings of 14th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing pp. 137–146 (1982)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kun, G., Nešetřil, J. (2007). NP by Means of Lifts and Shadows. In: Kučera, L., Kučera, A. (eds) Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science 2007. MFCS 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4708. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74456-6_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74456-6_17
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74455-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-74456-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)