STACS 2000 17th Annual Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science Lille, France, February 17-19, 2000 Proceedings

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, STACS 2000, held in Lille, France in February 2000.The 51 revised full papers presented together with the three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 146 submissions on the basis of some 700 reviewers' reports. The papers address fundamental issues from all current areas of theoretical computer science including algorithms, data structures, automata, formal languages, complexity, verification, logic, cryptography, graph theory, optimization, etc.

Codes and Graphs.- A Classification of Symbolic Transition Systems.- Circuits versus Trees in Algebraic Complexity.- On the Many Faces of Block Codes.- A New Algorithm for MAX-2-SAT.- Bias Invariance of Small Upper Spans.- The Complexity of Planarity Testing.- About Cube-Free Morphisms.- Linear Cellular Automata with Multiple State Variables.- Two-Variable Word Equations.- Average-Case Quantum Query Complexity.- Tradeoffs between Nondeterminism and Complexity for Communication Protocols and Branching Programs.- The Boolean Hierarchy of NP-Partitions.- Binary Exponential Backoff Is Stable for High Arrival Rates.- The Data Broadcast Problem with Preemption.- An Approximate L p-Difference Algorithm for Massive Data Streams.- Succinct Representations of Model Based Belief Revision.- Logics Capturing Local Properties.- The Complexity of Poor Man’s Logic.- Fast Integer Sorting in Linear Space.- On the Performance of WEAK-HEAPSORT.- On the Two-Variable Fragment of the Equational Theory of the Max-Sum Algebra of the Natural Numbers.- Real-Time Automata and the Kleene Algebra of Sets of Real Numbers.- Small Progress Measures for Solving Parity Games.- Multi-linearity Self-Testing with Relative Error.- Nondeterministic Instance Complexity and Hard-to-Prove Tautologies.- Hard Instances of Hard Problems.- Simulation and Bisimulation over One-Counter Processes.- Decidability of Reachability Problems for Classes of Two Counters Automata.- Hereditary History Preserving Bisimilarity Is Undecidable.- The Hardness of Approximating Spanner Problems.- An Improved Lower Bound on the Approximability of Metric TSP and Approximation Algorithms for the TSP with Sharpened Triangle Inequality.- ?-Coloring of Graphs.- Optimal Proof Systems and Sparse Sets.- Almost Complete Sets.- Graph Isomorphism Is Low for ZPP(NP) and Other Lowness Results.- An Approximation Algorithm for the Precedence Constrained Scheduling Problem with Hierarchical Communications.- Polynomial Time Approximation Schemes for the Multiprocessor Open and Flow Shop Scheduling Problem.- Controlled Conspiracy-2 Search.- The Stability of Saturated Linear Dynamical Systems Is Undecidable.- Tilings: Recursivity and Regularity.- Listing All Potential Maximal Cliques of a Graph.- Distance Labeling Schemes for Well-Separated Graph Classes.- Pruning Graphs with Digital Search Trees. Application to Distance Hereditary Graphs.- Characterizing and Deciding MSO-Definability of Macro Tree Transductions.- Languages of Dot-Depth 3/2.- Random Generation and Approximate Counting of Ambiguously Described Combinatorial Structures.- The CNN Problem and Other k-Server Variants.- The Weighted 2-Server Problem.- On the Competitive Ratio of the Work Function Algorithm for the k-Server Problem.- Spectral Bounds on General Hard Core Predicates.- Randomness in Visual Cryptography.- Online Dial-a-Ride Problems: Minimizing the Completion Time.- The Power Range Assignment Problem in Radio Networks on the Plane.