Even though the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) is NP-complete, many tractable classes of CSP instances have been identified. After discussing different forms and uses of tractability, we describe some landmark tractable classes and survey recent theoretical results. Although we concentrate on the classical CSP, we also cover its important extensions to infinite domains and optimisation, as well as #CSP and QCSP. What is tractability?The idea that an algorithm is efficient if its time complexity is a polynomial function of the size of its input can be traced back to pioneering work of Cobham [45] and Edmonds [83], but the foundations of complexity theory are based on the seminal work of Cook [52] and Karp [118]. A computational decision problem (such as the constraint satisfaction problem or CSP) consists of a generic instance (in the case of the CSP, a set of variables, their

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