Dismantlability, connectedness, and mixing in relational structures. The Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) and its counting counterpart appears under different guises in many areas of mathematics, computer science, and elsewhere. Its structural and algorithmic properties have demonstrated to play a crucial role in many of those applications. For instance, in the decision CSPs, structural properties of the relational structures involvedlike, for example, dismantlabilityand their logical characterizations have been instrumental for determining the complexity and other properties of the problem. Topological properties of the solution set such as connectedness are related to the hardness of CSPs over random structures. Additionally, in approximate counting and statistical physics, where CSPs emerge in the form of spin systems, mixing properties and the uniqueness of Gibbs measures have been heavily exploited for approximating partition functions and free energy.  :125,spite of the great diversity of those features, there are some eerie similarities between them. These were observed and made more precise in the case of graph homomorphisms by Brightwell and Winkler, who showed that dismantlability of the target graph, connectedness of the set of homomorphisms, and good mixing properties of the corresponding spin system are all equivalent. In this paper we go a step further and demonstrate similar connections for arbitrary CSPs. This requires much deeper understanding of dismantling and the structure of the solution space in the case of relational structures, and new refined concepts of mixing introduced by Briceno. In addition, we develop properties related to the study of valid extensions of a given partially defined homomorphism, an approach that turns out to be novel even in the graph case. We also add to the mix the combinatorial property of finite duality and its logic counterpart, FOdefinability, studied by Larose, Loten, and Tardif.

Relational Width of FirstOrder Expansions of Homogeneous Graphs with Bounded Strict Width. Solving the algebraic dichotomy conjecture for constraint satisfaction problems over structures firstorder definable in countably infinite finitely bounded homogeneous structures requires understanding the applicability of localconsistency methods in this setting. We study the amount of consistency (measured by relational width) needed to solve CSP for firstorder 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.  :101,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).