Abstract
The logic MMSNP is a restricted fragment of existential second-order logic which can express many interesting queries in graph theory and finite model theory. The logic was introduced by Feder and Vardi, who showed that every MMSNP sentence is computationally equivalent to a finite-domain constraint satisfaction problem (CSP); the involved probabilistic reductions were derandomized by Kun using explicit constructions of expander structures.
We present a new proof of the reduction to finite-domain CSPs that does not rely on the results of Kun. The new universalalgebraic proof allows us to obtain a stronger statement and to verify the more general Bodirsky-Pinsker dichotomy conjecture for CSPs in MMSNP.
Our approach uses the fact that every MMSNP sentence describes a finite union of CSPs for countably infinite omega-categorical structures; moreover, by a recent result of Hubicka and Nesetril, these structures can be expanded to homogeneous structures with finite relational signature and the Ramsey property.