Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-computer-science-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2015/intelligent-systems/3/b/iii/solution

Use the ordinary treewidth of the primal graph of the constraint hypergraph: two variables are adjacent whenever they occur together in an all-different constraint. Equivalently, a tree decomposition of this constraint hypergraph has a bag containing every constraint scope, together with the running-intersection requirement for each variable. This is distinct from taking the treewidth of its incidence drawing.
Introduce a central bag and the five scope bags
Join to each of , join to , and join to :
Figure 1.
A minimum-width tree decomposition with central bag containing variables 2, 4, and 5
. Details.
Every constraint scope is contained in its own bag, and every variable occurs. The nontrivial running-intersection checks are: occurs along ; along the connected branches ; along ; along ; and along . Each of the other variables occurs in just one bag. This is therefore a valid tree decomposition of width .
Conversely, any of the original three-variable constraint scopes forms a clique of size three in the primal graph. Such a clique must be contained in one bag of every tree decomposition, forcing width at least two. The upper and lower bounds agree:

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