Relational Width of First-Order Expansions of Homogeneous Graphs with Bounded Strict Width

Abstract

Solving the algebraic dichotomy conjecture for constraint satisfaction problems over structures first-order definable in countably infinite finitely bounded homogeneous structures requires understanding the applicability of local-consistency methods in this setting. We study the amount of consistency (measured by relational width) needed to solve CSP for first-order expansions S of countably infinite homogeneous graphs that additionally have bounded strict width, i.e., for which establishing local consistency of an instance of the CSP not only decides if there is a solution but also ensures that every solution may be obtained from a locally consistent instance by greedily assigning values to variables, without backtracking. Our main result is that the structures S under consideration have relational width exactly (2, L) where L is the maximal size of a forbidden subgraph of a homogeneous graph under consideration, but not smaller than 3. It beats the upper bound (2m, 3m) where m = max(arity(S)+1, L, 3) and arity(S) is the largest arity of a relation in S, which follows from a sufficient condition implying bounded relational width from the literature. Since L may be arbitrarily large, our result contrasts the collapse of the relational bounded width hierarchy for finite structures , whose relational width, if finite, is always at most (2,3).