Counting Constraint Satisfaction Problems

This chapter surveys counting Constraint Satisfaction Problems (counting CSPs, or #CSPs) and their computational complexity. It aims to provide an introduction to the main concepts and techniques, and present a representative selection of results and open problems. It does not cover holants, which are the subject of a separate chapter

A Dichotomy Theorem for the Approximate Counting of Complex-Weighted Bounded-Degree Boolean CSPs

We determine the computational complexity of approximately counting the total weight of variable assignments for every complex-weighted Boolean constraint satisfaction problem (or CSP) with any number of additional unary (i.e., arity 1) constraints, particularly, when degrees of input instances are bounded from above by a fixed constant. All degree-1 counting CSPs are obviously solvable in polynomial time. When the instance's degree is more than two, we present a dichotomy theorem that classifies all counting CSPs admitting free unary constraints into exactly two categories. This classification theorem extends, to complex-weighted problems, an earlier result on the approximation complexity of unweighted counting Boolean CSPs of bounded degree. The framework of the proof of our theorem is based on a theory of signature developed from Valiant's holographic algorithms that can efficiently solve seemingly intractable counting CSPs. Despite the use of arbitrary complex weight, our proof of the classification theorem is rather elementary and intuitive due to an extensive use of a novel notion of limited T-constructibility. For the remaining degree-2 problems, in contrast, they are as hard to approximate as Holant problems, which are a generalization of counting CSPs.Comment: A4, 10pt, 20 pages. This revised version improves its preliminary version published under a slightly different title in the Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications (COCOA 2010), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Vol.6508 (Part I), pp.285--299, Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, USA, December 18--20, 201

Approximation Complexity of Complex-Weighted Degree-Two Counting Constraint Satisfaction Problems

Constraint satisfaction problems have been studied in numerous fields with practical and theoretical interests. In recent years, major breakthroughs have been made in a study of counting constraint satisfaction problems (or #CSPs). In particular, a computational complexity classification of bounded-degree #CSPs has been discovered for all degrees except for two, where the "degree" of an input instance is the maximal number of times that each input variable appears in a given set of constraints. Despite the efforts of recent studies, however, a complexity classification of degree-2 #CSPs has eluded from our understandings. This paper challenges this open problem and gives its partial solution by applying two novel proof techniques--T_{2}-constructibility and parametrized symmetrization--which are specifically designed to handle "arbitrary" constraints under randomized approximation-preserving reductions. We partition entire constraints into four sets and we classify the approximation complexity of all degree-2 #CSPs whose constraints are drawn from two of the four sets into two categories: problems computable in polynomial-time or problems that are at least as hard as #SAT. Our proof exploits a close relationship between complex-weighted degree-2 #CSPs and Holant problems, which are a natural generalization of complex-weighted #CSPs.Comment: A4, 10pt, 23 pages. This is a complete version of the paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON 2011), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol.6842, pp.122-133, Dallas, Texas, USA, August 14-16, 201

09441 Abstracts Collection -- The Constraint Satisfaction Problem: Complexity and Approximability

From 25th to 30th October 2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09441 ``The Constraint Satisfaction Problem: Complexity and Approximability\u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

The Complexity of Approximately Counting Tree Homomorphisms

We study two computational problems, parameterised by a fixed tree H. #HomsTo(H) is the problem of counting homomorphisms from an input graph G to H. #WHomsTo(H) is the problem of counting weighted homomorphisms to H, given an input graph G and a weight function for each vertex v of G. Even though H is a tree, these problems turn out to be sufficiently rich to capture all of the known approximation behaviour in #P. We give a complete trichotomy for #WHomsTo(H). If H is a star then #WHomsTo(H) is in FP. If H is not a star but it does not contain a certain induced subgraph J_3 then #WHomsTo(H) is equivalent under approximation-preserving (AP) reductions to #BIS, the problem of counting independent sets in a bipartite graph. This problem is complete for the class #RHPi_1 under AP-reductions. Finally, if H contains an induced J_3 then #WHomsTo(H) is equivalent under AP-reductions to #SAT, the problem of counting satisfying assignments to a CNF Boolean formula. Thus, #WHomsTo(H) is complete for #P under AP-reductions. The results are similar for #HomsTo(H) except that a rich structure emerges if H contains an induced J_3. We show that there are trees H for which #HomsTo(H) is #SAT-equivalent (disproving a plausible conjecture of Kelk). There is an interesting connection between these homomorphism-counting problems and the problem of approximating the partition function of the ferromagnetic Potts model. In particular, we show that for a family of graphs J_q, parameterised by a positive integer q, the problem #HomsTo(H) is AP-interreducible with the problem of approximating the partition function of the q-state Potts model. It was not previously known that the Potts model had a homomorphism-counting interpretation. We use this connection to obtain some additional upper bounds for the approximation complexity of #HomsTo(J_q)