Conservative constraint satisfaction re-revisited

Conservative constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) constitute an important particular case of the general CSP, in which the allowed values of each variable can be restricted in an arbitrary way. Problems of this type are well studied for graph homomorphisms. A dichotomy theorem characterizing conservative CSPs solvable in polynomial time and proving that the remaining ones are NP-complete was proved by Bulatov (2003) in [4]. Its proof, however, is quite long and technical. A shorter proof of this result based on the absorbing subuniverses technique was suggested by Barto (2011) in [1]. In this paper we give a short elementary proof of the dichotomy theorem for conservative CSPs.