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Infinitely repeated games can support cooperative outcomes that are not equilibria in the one-shot game. The idea is to make sure that any gains from deviating will be offset by retaliation in future rounds. However, this model of cooperation fails in anonymous settings with many strategic agents that interact in pairs. Here, a player can defect and then avoid penalization by immediately switching partners. In this paper, we focus on a specific set of equilibria that avoids this pitfall. In them, agents follow a designated sequence of actions, and restart if their opponent ever deviates. We show that the socially-optimal sequence of actions consists of an infinitely repeating goal value, preceded by a hazing period. We introduce an equivalence relation on sequences and prove that the computational problem of finding a representative from the optimal equivalence class is (weakly) NP-hard. Nevertheless, we present a pseudo-polynomial time dynamic program for this problem, as well as an integer linear program, and show they are efficient in practice. Lastly, we introduce a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme that outputs a hazing sequence with arbitrarily small approximation ratio., Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, main body to be published in Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-24), Jeju, South Korea, 2024

A challenge for scalability of demand-responsive, elastic optical Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) and Flexgrid networks is the computational complexity of allocating many optical routes on large networks. We demonstrate that demand satisfaction problems in communication networks can be formulated as quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation (QUBO) problems, and solved using a hybrid quantum annealer. Efficient encodings are developed which solve both unicast and multicast multicommodity-flow problems, while also adhering to individual requirements for maximum latency and resilience for each route. We present several QUBO formulations and analyse the qubit scaling. We demonstrate solutions using a hybrid solver, D-Wave Quantum Advantage QPU. Progress in generating optimal solutions with efficient use of computational resources will be beneficial to telecoms operators, enabling them to run dynamic optical network infrastructures which use resources efficiently, are resilient to local faults and cyber-attacks, and can be elastically responsive to demands., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures

This paper describes the formal verification of NP-hardness reduction functions of two key problems relevant in algebraic lattice theory: the closest vector problem and the shortest vector problem, both in the infinity norm. The formalization uncovered a number of problems with the existing proofs in the literature. The paper describes how these problems were corrected in the formalization. The work was carried out in the proof assistant Isabelle., Comment: to be published at CADE-29

We introduce structured decompositions. These are category-theoretic data structures which simlutaneously generalize notions from graph theory (including tree-width, layered tree-width, co-tree-width and graph decomposition width) geometric group theory (specifically Bass-Serre theory) and dynamical systems (e.g. hybrid dynamical systems). Furthermore, structured decompositions allow us to generalize these aforementioned combinatorial invariants, which have played a central role in the study of structural and algorithmic compositionality in both graph theory and parameterized complexity, to new settings. For example, in any category with enough colimits they describe algorithmically useful structural compositionality: as an application of our theory we prove an algorithmic meta-theorem for the Sub_P-composition problem. In concrete terms, when instantiated in the category of graphs, this meta-theorem yields compositional algorithms for NP-hard problems such as: Maximum Bipartite Subgraph, Maximum Planar Subgraph and Longest Path., Comment: Updated notation and simplified proofs

We introduce Proteus, a novel self-designing approximate range filter, which configures itself based on sampled data in order to optimize its false positive rate (FPR) for a given space requirement. Proteus unifies the probabilistic and deterministic design spaces of state-of-the-art range filters to achieve robust performance across a larger variety of use cases. At the core of Proteus lies our Contextual Prefix FPR (CPFPR) model - a formal framework for the FPR of prefix-based filters across their design spaces. We empirically demonstrate the accuracy of our model and Proteus' ability to optimize over both synthetic workloads and real-world datasets. We further evaluate Proteus in RocksDB and show that it is able to improve end-to-end performance by as much as 5.3x over more brittle state-of-the-art methods such as SuRF and Rosetta. Our experiments also indicate that the cost of modeling is not significant compared to the end-to-end performance gains and that Proteus is robust to workload shifts., Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, originally published in the Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD'22), ISBN: 9781450392495

Given a weighted graph $G$ with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, and a positive integer $p$, the Hamiltonian $p$-median problem consists in finding $p$ cycles of minimum total weight such that each vertex of $G$ is in exactly one cycle. We introduce an $O(n^6)$ 3-approximation algorithm for the particular case in which $p \leq \lceil \frac{n-2\lceil \frac{n}{5} \rceil}{3} \rceil$. An approximation ratio of 2 might be obtained depending on the number of components in the optimal 2-factor of $G$. We present computational experiments comparing the approximation algorithm to an exact algorithm from the literature. In practice much better ratios are obtained. For large values of $p$, the exact algorithm is outperformed by our approximation algorithm.

A pendant vertex is one of degree one and an isolated vertex has degree zero. A neighborhood star-free (NSF for short) graph is one in which every vertex is contained in a triangle except pendant vertices and isolated vertices. This class has been considered before for several contexts. In the present paper, we study the complexity of the dominating induced matching (DIM) problem and the perfect edge domination (PED) problem for NSF graphs. We prove the corresponding decision problems are NP-Complete for several of its subclasses. As an added value of this study, we have shown three connected variants of planar positive 1in3SAT are also NP-Complete. Since these variants are more basic in complexity theory context than many graph problems, these results can be useful to prove that other problems are NP-Complete.

Counting the number of occurrences of small connected subgraphs, called temporal motifs, has become a fundamental primitive for the analysis of temporal networks, whose edges are annotated with the time of the event they represent. One of the main complications in studying temporal motifs is the large number of motifs that can be built even with a limited number of vertices or edges. As a consequence, since in many applications motifs are employed for exploratory analyses, the user needs to iteratively select and analyze several motifs that represent different aspects of the network, resulting in an inefficient, time-consuming process. This problem is exacerbated in large networks, where the analysis of even a single motif is computationally demanding. As a solution, in this work we propose and study the problem of simultaneously counting the number of occurrences of multiple temporal motifs, all corresponding to the same (static) topology (e.g., a triangle). Given that for large temporal networks computing the exact counts is unfeasible, we propose odeN, a sampling-based algorithm that provides an accurate approximation of all the counts of the motifs. We provide analytical bounds on the number of samples required by odeN to compute rigorous, probabilistic, relative approximations. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that odeN enables the approximation of the counts of motifs in temporal networks in a fraction of the time needed by state-of-the-art methods, and that it also reports more accurate approximations than such methods., Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, accepted at CIKM 2021

An algorithm for reversible logic synthesis is proposed. The task is, for a given $n$-bit substitution map $P_n: \{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}^n$, to find a sequence of reversible logic gates that implements the map. The gate library adopted in this work consists of multiple-controlled Toffoli gates denoted by $C^m\!X$, where $m$ is the number of control bits that ranges from 0 to $n-1$. Controlled gates with large $m \,\,(>2)$ are then further decomposed into $C^0\!X$, $C^1\!X$, and $C^2\!X$ gates. A primary concern in designing the algorithm is to reduce the use of $C^2\!X$ gate (also known as Toffoli gate) which is known to be universal. The main idea is to view an $n$-bit substitution map as a rank-$2n$ tensor and to transform it such that the resulting map can be written as a tensor product of a rank-($2n-2$) tensor and the $2\times 2$ identity matrix. Let $\mathcal{P}_n$ be a set of all $n$-bit substitution maps. What we try to find is a size reduction map $\mathcal{A}_{\rm red}: \mathcal{P}_n \rightarrow \{P_n: P_n = P_{n-1} \otimes I_2\}$. %, where $I_m$ is the $m\times m$ identity matrix. One can see that the output $P_{n-1} \otimes I_2$ acts nontrivially on $n-1$ bits only, meaning that the map to be synthesized becomes $P_{n-1}$. The size reduction process is iteratively applied until it reaches tensor product of only $2 \times 2$ matrices.

The optimal mixing evolutionary algorithms (OMEAs) have recently drawn much attention for their robustness, small size of required population, and efficiency in terms of number of function evaluations (NFE). In this paper, the performances and behaviors of OMEAs are studied by investigating the mechanism of optimal mixing (OM), the variation operator in OMEAs, under two scenarios -- one-layer and two-layer masks. For the case of one-layer masks, the required population size is derived from the viewpoint of initial supply, while the convergence time is derived by analyzing the progress of sub-solution growth. NFE is then asymptotically bounded with rational probability by estimating the probability of performing evaluations. For the case of two-layer masks, empirical results indicate that the required population size is proportional to both the degree of cross competition and the results from the one-layer-mask case. The derived models also indicate that population sizing is decided by initial supply when disjoint masks are adopted, that the high selection pressure imposed by OM makes the composition of sub-problems impact little on NFE, and that the population size requirement for two-layer masks increases with the reverse-growth probability., Comment: 8 pages, 2015 GECCO oral paper

We define a new type of "shatter function" for set systems that satisfies a Sauer-Shelah type dichotomy, but whose polynomial-growth case is governed by Shelah's 2-rank instead of VC dimension. We identify the rate of growth of this shatter function, the quantity analogous to VC density, with Shelah's $\omega$-rank., Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures

Context-free games are two-player rewriting games that are played on nested strings representing XML documents with embedded function symbols. These games were introduced to model rewriting processes for intensional documents in the Active XML framework, where input documents are to be rewritten into a given target schema by calls to external services. This paper studies the setting where dependencies between inputs and outputs of service calls are modelled by transducers, which has not been examined previously. It defines transducer models operating on nested words and studies their properties, as well as the computational complexity of the winning problem for transducer-based context-free games in several scenarios. While the complexity of this problem is quite high in most settings (ranging from NP-complete to undecidable), some tractable restrictions are also identified., Comment: Extended version of MFCS 2016 conference paper

The continuous evolution of a wide variety of systems, including continuous-time Markov chains and linear hybrid automata, can be described in terms of linear differential equations. In this paper we study the decision problem of whether the solution $\boldsymbol{x}(t)$ of a system of linear differential equations $d\boldsymbol{x}/dt=A\boldsymbol{x}$ reaches a target halfspace infinitely often. This recurrent reachability problem can equivalently be formulated as the following Infinite Zeros Problem: does a real-valued function $f:\mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}\rightarrow\mathbb{R}$ satisfying a given linear differential equation have infinitely many zeros? Our main decidability result is that if the differential equation has order at most $7$, then the Infinite Zeros Problem is decidable. On the other hand, we show that a decision procedure for the Infinite Zeros Problem at order $9$ (and above) would entail a major breakthrough in Diophantine Approximation, specifically an algorithm for computing the Lagrange constants of arbitrary real algebraic numbers to arbitrary precision., Comment: Full version of paper at LICS'16

The paper studies the rewriting mechanisms for intensional documents in the Active XML framework, abstracted in the form of active context-free games. The safe rewriting problem studied in this paper is to decide whether the first player, Juliet, has a winning strategy for a given game and (nested) word; this corresponds to a successful rewriting strategy for a given intensional document. The paper examines several extensions to active context-free games. The primary extension allows more expressive schemas (namely XML schemas and regular nested word languages) for both target and replacement languages and has the effect that games are played on nested words instead of (flat) words as in previous studies. Other extensions consider validation of input parameters of web services, and an alternative semantics based on insertion of service call results. In general, the complexity of the safe rewriting problem is highly intractable (doubly exponential time), but the paper identifies interesting tractable cases., Comment: To be published in ICDT 2015

Entity-linking is a natural-language-processing task that consists in identifying the entities mentioned in a piece of text, linking each to an appropriate item in some knowledge base; when the knowledge base is Wikipedia, the problem comes to be known as wikification (in this case, items are wikipedia articles). One instance of entity-linking can be formalized as an optimization problem on the underlying concept graph, where the quantity to be optimized is the average distance between chosen items. Inspired by this application, we define a new graph problem which is a natural variant of the Maximum Capacity Representative Set. We prove that our problem is NP-hard for general graphs; nonetheless, under some restrictive assumptions, it turns out to be solvable in linear time. For the general case, we propose two heuristics: one tries to enforce the above assumptions and another one is based on the notion of hitting distance; we show experimentally how these approaches perform with respect to some baselines on a real-world dataset., Comment: In Proceedings GRAPHITE 2014, arXiv:1407.7671. The second and third authors were supported by the EU-FET grant NADINE (GA 288956)

We find large lower bounds for a certain family of algorithms, and prove that such bounds are limited only by natural computability arguments., Comment: 8 pages

Let $D$, called the domain, be a fixed finite set and let $\Gamma$, called the valued constraint language, be a fixed set of functions of the form $f:D^m\to\mathbb{Q}\cup\{\infty\}$, where different functions might have different arity $m$. We study the valued constraint satisfaction problem parametrised by $\Gamma$, denoted by VCSP$(\Gamma)$. These are minimisation problems given by $n$ variables and the objective function given by a sum of functions from $\Gamma$, each depending on a subset of the $n$ variables. Finite-valued constraint languages contain functions that take on only rational values and not infinite values. Our main result is a precise algebraic characterisation of valued constraint languages whose instances can be solved exactly by the basic linear programming relaxation (BLP). For a valued constraint language $\Gamma$, BLP is a decision procedure for $\Gamma$ if and only if $\Gamma$ admits a symmetric fractional polymorphism of every arity. For a finite-valued constraint language $\Gamma$, BLP is a decision procedure if and only if $\Gamma$ admits a symmetric fractional polymorphism of some arity, or equivalently, if $\Gamma$ admits a symmetric fractional polymorphism of arity 2. Using these results, we obtain tractability of several novel classes of problems, including problems over valued constraint languages that are: (1) submodular on arbitrary lattices; (2) $k$-submodular on arbitrary finite domains; (3) weakly (and hence strongly) tree-submodular on arbitrary trees., Comment: A full version of a FOCS'12 paper by the last two authors (arXiv:1204.1079) and an ICALP'13 paper by the first author (arXiv:1207.7213) to appear in SIAM Journal on Computing (SICOMP)

Given a tesselation of the plane, defined by a planar straight-line graph $G$, we want to find a minimal set $S$ of points in the plane, such that the Voronoi diagram associated with $S$ "fits" \ $G$. This is the Generalized Inverse Voronoi Problem (GIVP), defined in \cite{Trin07} and rediscovered recently in \cite{Baner12}. Here we give an algorithm that solves this problem with a number of points that is linear in the size of $G$, assuming that the smallest angle in $G$ is constant., Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 1 table. Presented at IWOCA 2013 (Int. Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms), Rouen, France, July 2013

A while ago, I developed what I called an encryption method. The most favorable of reviews did not see a method but a collection of techniques. Be that as it may, the process used, is described in the paper, Windtalking Computers. This paper is about the steganographic method described, the cryptanalysis efforts of that method and; a real world application of that method as an answer to the increasing problem of password file hacking. The premise is that the technique is a variant of one time pad, using a novel way to produce one time pad output for digital input. There is no record in the literature of such a method being used for encryption at all. Digital encryption generally treats the letters of the plaintext as a binary number and does some mathematical computation to produce ciphertext. The idea of inserting bits with a random generated key is new. Therefore (because a uniquely random generated key is used), the encryption is cryptanalytically unbreakable and/or computationally secure and/or information theoretic. An academic version was made. Challenges for decryption have not produced to-date a decryption. Advantages and disadvantages of the method are discussed. Hackers are constantly penetrating networks and stealing password files. Which, once in possession of a password file, hackers individually or collectively with distributed processing over the Internet, decrypt the values of the hash passwords. Thereby gaining access to systems. This problem has become sufficiently significant for CAESAR (Competition for Authenticated Encryption: Security, Applicability, and Robustness) to make calls for papers for solutions. Herein is one proposed solution. While one time pad presents a problem being computationally intensive, for the relatively short length of passwords, the cost of computation may be cost effective for the security provided., Comment: Draft for CAESER 2014 submission

We develop a static complexity analysis for a higher-order functional language with structural list recursion. The complexity of an expression is a pair consisting of a cost and a potential. The former is defined to be the size of the expression's evaluation derivation in a standard big-step operational semantics. The latter is a measure of the "future" cost of using the value of that expression. A translation function tr maps target expressions to complexities. Our main result is the following Soundness Theorem: If t is a term in the target language, then the cost component of tr(t) is an upper bound on the cost of evaluating t. The proof of the Soundness Theorem is formalized in Coq, providing certified upper bounds on the cost of any expression in the target language., Comment: Final version

A class of valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSPs) is characterised by a valued constraint language, a fixed set of cost functions on a finite domain. An instance of the problem is specified by a sum of cost functions from the language with the goal to minimise the sum. This framework includes and generalises well-studied constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) and maximum constraint satisfaction problems (Max-CSPs). Our main result is a precise algebraic characterisation of valued constraint languages whose instances can be solved exactly by the basic linear programming relaxation. Using this result, we obtain tractability of several novel and previously widely-open classes of VCSPs, including problems over valued constraint languages that are: (1) submodular on arbitrary lattices; (2) bisubmodular (also known as k-submodular) on arbitrary finite domains; (3) weakly (and hence strongly) tree-submodular on arbitrary trees., Comment: Corrected a few typos

We consider the problems of deterministic broadcasting and gossiping in completely unknown ad-hoc radio networks. We assume that nothing is known to the nodes about the topology or even the size of the network, $n$, except that $n > 1$. Protocols for vanilla model, when $n$ is known, may be run for increasingly larger estimates $2^i$ on the size of the network, but one cannot determine when such a protocol should terminate. Thus, to carry this design paradigm, successful completion or in-completion of the process should be detected, and this knowledge circulated in the network. We consider the problem of deterministic Acknowledged Broadcasting and Gossiping when nodes can take polynomially large labels. For the above setting, we present the following results for strongly connected networks: (a) A deterministic protocol for acknowledged broadcasting which takes $NRG(n,n^c)$ rounds, where $NRG(n,n^c)$ is the round complexity of deterministic gossiping for vanilla model. (b) A deterministic protocol for acknowledged gossiping, which takes $O(n^2 \lg n)$ rounds when collision detection mechanism is available. The structure of the transmissions of nodes in the network, to enable them to infer collisions, and discover existence of unknown in-neighborhood as a result, is abstracted as a family of integral sets called Selecting-Colliding family. We prove the existence of Selecting-Colliding families using the probabilistic method and employ them to design protocol for acknowledged gossiping when no collision detection mechanism is available. Finally, we present a deterministic protocol for acknowledged broadcasting for bidirectional networks, with a round complexity of $O(n \lg n)$ rounds., Comment: 19 pages

We present and analyze a wait-free deterministic algorithm for solving the at-most-once problem: how m shared-memory fail-prone processes perform asynchronously n jobs at most once. Our algorithmic strategy provides for the first time nearly optimal effectiveness, which is a measure that expresses the total number of jobs completed in the worst case. The effectiveness of our algorithm equals n-2m+2. This is up to an additive factor of m close to the known effectiveness upper bound n-m+1 over all possible algorithms and improves on the previously best known deterministic solutions that have effectiveness only n-log m o(n). We also present an iterative version of our algorithm that for any $m = O\left(\sqrt[3+\epsilon]{n/\log n}\right)$ is both effectiveness-optimal and work-optimal, for any constant $\epsilon > 0$. We then employ this algorithm to provide a new algorithmic solution for the Write-All problem which is work optimal for any $m=O\left(\sqrt[3+\epsilon]{n/\log n}\right)$., Comment: Updated Version. A Brief Announcement was published in PODC 2011. An Extended Abstract was published in the proceeding of ICDCN 2012. A full version was published in Theoretical Computer Science, Volume 496, 22 July 2013, Pages 69 - 88

We study the power-aware buffering problem in battery-powered sensor networks, focusing on the fixed-size and fixed-interval buffering schemes. The main motivation is to address the yet poorly understood size variation-induced effect on power-aware buffering schemes. Our theoretical analysis elucidates the fundamental differences between the fixed-size and fixed-interval buffering schemes in the presence of data size variation. It shows that data size variation has detrimental effects on the power expenditure of the fixed-size buffering in general, and reveals that the size variation induced effects can be either mitigated by a positive skewness or promoted by a negative skewness in size distribution. By contrast, the fixed-interval buffering scheme has an obvious advantage of being eminently immune to the data-size variation. Hence the fixed-interval buffering scheme is a risk-averse strategy for its robustness in a variety of operational environments. In addition, based on the fixed-interval buffering scheme, we establish the power consumption relationship between child nodes and parent node in a static data collection tree, and give an in-depth analysis of the impact of child bandwidth distribution on parent's power consumption. This study is of practical significance: it sheds new light on the relationship among power consumption of buffering schemes, power parameters of radio module and memory bank, data arrival rate and data size variation, thereby providing well-informed guidance in determining an optimal buffer size (interval) to maximize the operational lifespan of sensor networks.

This paper is concerned with the problem of implementing an unbounded timestamp object from multi-writer atomic registers, in an asynchronous distributed system of n processors with distinct identifiers where timestamps are taken from an arbitrary universe. Ellen, Fatourou and Ruppert (2008) showed that sqrt{n}/2-O(1) registers are required for any obstruction-free implementation of long-lived timestamp systems from atomic registers (meaning processors can repeatedly get timestamps). We improve this existing lower bound in two ways. First we establish a lower bound of n/6 - O(1) registers for the obstruction-free long-lived timestamp problem. Previous such linear lower bounds were only known for constrained versions of the timestamp problem. This bound is asymptotically tight; Ellen, Fatourou and Ruppert (2008) constructed a wait-free algorithm that uses n-1 registers. Second we show that sqrt{n} - O(1) registers are required for any obstruction-free implementation of one-shot timestamp systems(meaning each processor can get a timestamp at most once). We show that this bound is also asymptotically tight by providing a wait-free one-shot timestamp system that uses fewer than 2 sqrt{n} registers, thus establishing a space complexity gap between one-shot and long-lived timestamp systems.

We give a new and short proof of a theorem on k-hypertournament losing scores due to Zhou et al. [G. Zhou, T. Yao, K. Zhang, On score sequences of k-tournaments, European J. Comb., 21, 8 (2000) 993-1000.]

This paper discusses the application of known techniques, knowledge and technology in a novel way for encryption. Two distinct and separate methods are presented. Method 1: Alter the symbol set of the language by adding additional redundant symbols for frequent symbols. This will reduce the high frequency of more commonly used symbols. Hence, frequency analysis upon ciphertext will not be possible. Hence, decryption will be possible. Method 2: Computers use binary base 2. Most encryption systems use ciphering to convert data to ciphertext. The author presents the theory and several possible implementations of a method for computers analogous to speaking another language. This is done by using a binary base other than base 2. Ex. Fibonacci, Phi or Prime. In addition, steganography may be used for creating alternate binary bases. This kind of encryption significantly increases the complexity of decryption. First the binary base must be known. Only then, can decryption begin. This kind of encryption also breaks the transitivity of plaintext-codebook-binary; the correlation of letters-ASCII-base2. With this transitivity broken, decryption is logically impossible. Coupled with encrypting the plaintext, binary encryption makes decryption uncrackable. It may produce false positives--information theoretic secure, and requires much more computing power to resolve than is currently used in brute force decryption. Hence, the assertion that these combination of methods are computationally secure--impervious to brute force. The proposed system has a drawback. It is not as compressed as a base2. (Similar to adding random padding to the encryption.) However, this is acceptable, since the goal is very strong encryption: Both methods are not decryptable by method uncrackable - by conventional, statistical means., Comment: 33 pages; 5 Flowcharts; 12 Tables; Glossary Replaced to correct title Replaced to add original date written

Since the inception of genetic algorithmics the identification of computational efficiencies of the simple genetic algorithm (SGA) has been an important goal. In this paper we distinguish between a computational competency of the SGA--an efficient, but narrow computational ability--and a computational proficiency of the SGA--a computational ability that is both efficient and broad. Till date, attempts to deduce a computational proficiency of the SGA have been unsuccessful. It may, however, be possible to inductively infer a computational proficiency of the SGA from a set of related computational competencies that have been deduced. With this in mind we deduce two computational competencies of the SGA. These competencies, when considered together, point toward a remarkable computational proficiency of the SGA. This proficiency is pertinent to a general problem that is closely related to a well-known statistical problem at the cutting edge of computational genetics., Comment: Sharpened motivation, improved notation

Minimal-interval semantics associates with each query over a document a set of intervals, called witnesses, that are incomparable with respect to inclusion (i.e., they form an antichain): witnesses define the minimal regions of the document satisfying the query. Minimal-interval semantics makes it easy to define and compute several sophisticated proximity operators, provides snippets for user presentation, and can be used to rank documents. In this paper we provide algorithms for computing conjunction and disjunction that are linear in the number of intervals and logarithmic in the number of operands; for additional operators, such as ordered conjunction and Brouwerian difference, we provide linear algorithms. In all cases, space is linear in the number of operands. More importantly, we define a formal notion of optimal laziness, and either prove it, or prove its impossibility, for each algorithm. We cast our results in a general framework of antichains of intervals on total orders, making our algorithms directly applicable to other domains., Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures. A preliminary (now outdated) version was presented at SPIRE 2006

We define a measure of competitive performance for distributed algorithms based on throughput, the number of tasks that an algorithm can carry out in a fixed amount of work. This new measure complements the latency measure of Ajtai et al., which measures how quickly an algorithm can finish tasks that start at specified times. The novel feature of the throughput measure, which distinguishes it from the latency measure, is that it is compositional: it supports a notion of algorithms that are competitive relative to a class of subroutines, with the property that an algorithm that is k-competitive relative to a class of subroutines, combined with an l-competitive member of that class, gives a combined algorithm that is kl-competitive. In particular, we prove the throughput-competitiveness of a class of algorithms for collect operations, in which each of a group of n processes obtains all values stored in an array of n registers. Collects are a fundamental building block of a wide variety of shared-memory distributed algorithms, and we show that several such algorithms are competitive relative to collects. Inserting a competitive collect in these algorithms gives the first examples of competitive distributed algorithms obtained by composition using a general construction., Comment: 33 pages, 2 figures; full version of STOC 96 paper titled "Modular competitiveness for distributed algorithms."

Much work on argument systems has focussed on preferred extensions which define the maximal collectively defensible subsets. Identification and enumeration of these subsets is (under the usual assumptions) computationally demanding. We consider approaches to deciding if a subset S is a preferred extension which query a representations encoding all such extensions, so that the computational effort is invested once only (for the initial enumeration) rather than for each separate query., Comment: Proc. 9th Worskhop on Non-monotonic reasoning, Toulouse, 2002 (NMR'02) (7 pages)

In this note, we present results for the colouring problem on small world graphs created by rewiring square, triangular, and two kinds of cubic (with coordination numbers 5 and 6) lattices. As the rewiring parameter p tends to 1, we find the expected crossover to the behaviour of random graphs with corresponding connectivity. However, for the cubic lattices there is a region near p=0 for which the graphs are colourable. This could in principle be used as an additional heuristic for solving real world colouring or scheduling problems. Small worlds with connectivity 5 and p ~ 0.1 provide an interesting ensemble of graphs whose colourability is hard to determine. For square lattices, we get good data collapse plotting the fraction of colourable graphs against the rescaled parameter parameter $p N^{-\nu}$ with $\nu = 1.35$. No such collapse can be obtained for the data from lattices with coordination number 5 or 6., Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures

Phase transition is an important feature of SAT problem. For random k-SAT model, it is proved that as r (ratio of clauses to variables) increases, the structure of solutions will undergo a sudden change like satisfiability phase transition when r reaches a threshold point. This phenomenon shows that the satisfying truth assignments suddenly shift from being relatively different from each other to being very similar to each other., Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures