Space complexity of list H-colouring: a dichotomy

The Dichotomy Conjecture for constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) states that every CSP is in P or is NP-complete (Feder-Vardi, 1993). It has been verified for conservative problems (also known as list homomorphism problems) by A. Bulatov (2003). We augment this result by showing that for digraph templates H, every conservative CSP, denoted LHOM(H), is solvable in logspace or is hard for NL. More precisely, we introduce a digraph structure we call a circular N, and prove the following dichotomy: if H contains no circular N then LHOM(H) admits a logspace algorithm, and otherwise LHOM(H) is hard for NL. Our algorithm operates by reducing the lists in a complex manner based on a novel decomposition of an auxiliary digraph, combined with repeated applications of Reingold's algorithm for undirected reachability (2005). We also prove an algebraic version of this dichotomy: the digraphs without a circular N are precisely those that admit a finite chain of polymorphisms satisfying the Hagemann-Mitschke identities. This confirms a conjecture of Larose and Tesson (2007) for LHOM(H). Moreover, we show that the presence of a circular N can be decided in time polynomial in the size of H.

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