On Nontrivial Approximation of CSPs

Constraint satisfaction problems, more simply called CSPs are central in computer science, the most famous probably being Satisfiability, SAT, the basic NP-complete problem. In this talk we survey some results about the optimization version of CSPs where we want to satisfy as many constraints as possible.

One very simple approach to a CSP is to give random values to the variables. It turns out that for some CSPs, one example being Max-3Sat, unless P=NP, there is no polynomial time algorithm that can achieve a an approximation ratio that is superior to what is obtained by this trivial strategy. Some other CSPs, Max-Cut being a prime example, do allow very interesting non-trivial approximation algorithms which do give an approximation ratio that is substantially better than that obtained by a random assignment.

These results hint at a general classification problem of determining which CSPs do admit a polynomial time approximation algorithm that beats the random assignment by a constant factor. Positive results giving such algorithms tend to be based on semi-definite programming while the PCP theorem is the central tool for proving negative result.

We describe many of the known results in the area and also discuss some of the open problems.