A Characterisation of First-Order Constraint Satisfaction Problems

We characterise finite relational core structures admitting finitely many obstructions, in terms of special near unanimity functions, and in terms of dismantling properties of their square. As a consequence, we show that it is decidable to determine whether a constraint satisfaction problem is first-order definable: we show the general problem to be NP-complete, and give a polynomial-time algorithm in the case of cores

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