Some Applications of Graph Bandwidth to Constraint Satisfaction Problems

Bandwidth is a fundamental concept in graph theory which has some surprising applications to a class of AI search problems. Graph bandwidth provides a link between the syntactic structure of a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) and the complexity of the underlying search task. Bandwidth can be used to define a new class of easy CSP's, namely those that have limited constraint graph bandwidth. These CSP's can be solved in polynomial time, essentially by divide and conquer. This in turn suggests that bandwidth provides a mathematical measure of the decomposability of a search problem. In addition, bandwidth supplies a measure for comparing different search orderings for a given CSP. Statistical analysis suggests that backtracking with small bandwidth orderings leads to a more efficient search than that obtained under orderings with larger bandwidths. Small bandwidth orderings also limit the pruning that can be done by intelligent backtracking. If small bandwidth orderings a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1990
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Ramin Zabih
• Keywords: AAAI 1990, Constraint Satisfaction Problems, Graph Bandwidth, Intelligent Agents, Small Bandwidth Orderings