Ross Willard, Pure Mathematics Department, University of Waterloo
“Relational structures and polymorphisms; an introduction to the seminar”
This term we will work through two celebrated papers of L. Barto and M. Kozik: (1) ”Absorbing subalgebras, cyclic terms, and the constraint satisfaction problem,” Logical Methods in Computer Science, 8 (2012), 1-26; (2) ”Constraint satisfaction problems solvable by local consistency methods,” J. Assoc. Comput. Machin., to appear. In this first lecture I will give the background for and describe the main results of the papers. In subsequent weeks participants will take turns presenting sections of the papers. All are welcome.