Dichotomy for symmetric Boolean PCSPs

A PCSP is a combination of two CSPs defined by two similar templates; the computational question is to distinguish a YES instance of the first one from a NO instance of the second. The computational complexity of many PCSPs remains unknown. Even the case of Boolean templates (solved for CSP by Schaefer [STOC'78]) remains wide open. The main result of Brakensiek and Guruswami [SODA'18] shows that Boolean PCSPs exhibit a dichotomy (PTIME vs. NPC) when "all the clauses are symmetric and allow for negation of variables''. In this paper we remove the "allow for negation of variables'' assumption from the theorem. The "symmetric" assumption means that changing the order of variables in a constraint does not change its satisfiability. The "negation of variables" means that both of the templates share a relation which can be used to effectively negate Boolean variables. The main result of this paper establishes dichotomy for all the symmetric boolean templates. The tractability case of our theorem and the theorem of Brakensiek and Guruswami are almost identical. The main difference, and the main contribution of this work, is the new reason for hardness and the reasoning proving the split.

[1]  Thomas J. Schaefer,et al.  The complexity of satisfiability problems , 1978, STOC.

[2]  Libor Barto,et al.  Robust satisfiability of constraint satisfaction problems , 2012, STOC '12.

[3]  Dmitriy Zhuk,et al.  A Proof of CSP Dichotomy Conjecture , 2017, 2017 IEEE 58th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS).

[4]  Venkatesan Guruswami,et al.  An Algorithmic Blend of LPs and Ring Equations for Promise CSPs , 2018, SODA.

[5]  Sangxia Huang,et al.  Improved Hardness of Approximating Chromatic Number , 2013, APPROX-RANDOM.

[6]  Marc Gyssens,et al.  Closure properties of constraints , 1997, JACM.

[7]  J. Håstad,et al.  (2 + epsilon)-Sat Is NP-Hard , 2017, 2014 IEEE 55th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.

[8]  Jakub Bulín,et al.  Algebraic approach to promise constraint satisfaction , 2018, STOC.

[9]  Peter Jeavons,et al.  Constraint Satisfaction Problems and Finite Algebras , 2000, ICALP.

[10]  Tomás Feder,et al.  The Computational Structure of Monotone Monadic SNP and Constraint Satisfaction: A Study through Datalog and Group Theory , 1999, SIAM J. Comput..

[11]  Andrei A. Bulatov,et al.  A Dichotomy Theorem for Nonuniform CSPs , 2017, 2017 IEEE 58th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS).

[12]  Vladimir Kolmogorov,et al.  The Complexity of General-Valued CSPs , 2015, 2015 IEEE 56th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.

[13]  Elchanan Mossel,et al.  Conditional Hardness for Approximate Coloring , 2009, SIAM J. Comput..

[14]  Venkatesan Guruswami,et al.  Promise Constraint Satisfaction: Structure Theory and a Symmetric Boolean Dichotomy , 2018, SODA.