MFCS 2001
26th International Symposium on
Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science
August 27 - 31, 2001
Marianske Lazne, Czech Republic
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Invited Speakers
Abstracts
Dana S. Scott: A New Category for Semantics
Domain theory for denotational semantics is over thirty
years old. There are many variations on the idea and many interesting
constructs that have been proposed by many people for realizing a wide
variety of types as domains. Generally, the effort has been to create
categories of domains that are cartesian closed (that is, have
products and function spaces interpreting typed lambda-calculus) and
permit solutions to domain equations (that is, interpret recursive
domain definitions and perhaps untyped lambda-calculus). What has
been missing is a simple connection between domains and the usual
set-theoretical structures of mathematics as well as a comprehensive
logic to reason about domains and the functions to be defined upon
them. In December of 1996, the author realized that the old idea of
partial equivalence relations on types could be applied to produce a
large and rich category containing many specific categories of domains
and allowing a suitable general logic. The category is called Equ,
the category of equilogical spaces. The simplest definition is the
category of T-0 spaces and total equivalence relations with continuous
maps that are equivariant (meaning, preserving the equivalence
relations). An equivalent definition uses algebraic (or continuous)
lattices and partial equivalence relations, together with continuous
equivariant maps. This category is not only cartesian closed, but it
is locally cartesian closed (that is, it has dependent sums and
products). Moreover it contains all T-0 spaces (and therefore the
category of sets and the category of domains) as a full subcategory.
The logic for this category is intuitionistic and can be explained by
a form of the realizability interpretation. The project now is to use
this idea as a unifying platform for semantics and reasoning.
Peter Buergisser: On Implications between P-NP-Hypotheses: Decision
versus Computation in Algebraic Complexity
Several models of NP-completeness in an algebraic framework of computation
have been proposed in the past, each of them hinging on a fundamental
hypothesis of type P \neq NP. We first survey the known implications
between such hypotheses and then describe attempts to establish further
connections. This leads us to the problem of relating the complexity of
computational and decisional tasks and naturally raises the question about
the connection of the complexity of a polynomial with those of its
factors. After reviewing what is known with this respect, we discuss a new
result involving a concept of approximative complexity.
Erik D. Demaine: Playing Games with Algorithms: Algorithmic Combinatorial
Game Theory
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms
and complexity theory. A combinatorial game typically involves two players, or
in the interesting case of a combinatorial puzzle, one player, or for a
cellular automaton such as Conway's Game of Life, zero players. No randomness
or privacy is allowed: all players know all information about gameplay.
The problem is thus purely strategic: how to best play the game against an
ideal opponent.
A beautiful mathematical theory has been developed for analyzing such games,
primarily in the book Winning Ways by Berlekamp, Conway, and Guy. But many
algorithmic problems remain open. Many classic games are known to be
computationally intractable: puzzles are often NP-complete (as in Minesweeper),
and two-player games are often PSPACE-complete (as in Go) or EXPTIME-complete
(as in Chess). Surprisingly, many seemingly simple games are also hard. I
will mention several such results I have been involved in: robot pushing-block
puzzles such as Sokoban, a block-removal puzzle Clickomania, and Conway's game
Philosopher's Football. More exciting results are positive, proving that some
games can be played optimally in polynomial time. I will describe one main
result in this area, a wide class of coin-sliding puzzles. Other still-open
problems I will discuss include firefighting on graphs, Conway's angel-devil
problem, and a cat-and-mouse game whose computational hardness (in a particular
sense) would prove that P does not equal NP.
Amos Fiat: Some Recent Results on Data Mining and Search
In this talk we review and survey some recent work and work in
progress on data mining and web search. We discuss Latent Semantic
Analysis and give conditions under which it is robust. We also
consider the problem of collaborative filtering and show how
spectral techniques can give a rigorous and robust justification
for doing so. We consider the problems of web search and show how
both Google and Klienberg's algorithm are robust under a model of
web generation, and how this model can be reasonably extended. We
then give an algorithm that provably gives the correct result in
this extended model. The results surveyed are joint work with
Azar, Karlin, McSherry and Saia, and Achlioptas,
Karlin and McSherry.
Georg Gottlob: Hypertree Decompositions
One of the best-known methods for decomposing graphs is the method of tree-decompositions
introduced by Robertson and Seymour. Many NP-hard problems become polynomially
soblvable if restricted to instances whose underlying graph structure has
bounded treewidth. The notion of treewidth can be straightforwardly extended
to hypergraphs by simply considering the treewidth of their primal graphs
or, alteratively, of their incidence graphs. However, doing so comes along
with a loss of information on the structure of a hypergraph with the effect
that many polynomially solvable problems cannot be recognized as such because
the treewidth of the underlying hypergraphs is unbounded. In particular,
the treewidth of the class of acyclic hypergraphs is unbounded. In this
talk, I will describe and discuss a decomposition method for hypergraphs
called hypertree-decompositions (recently introduced by Gottlob, Leone,
and Scarcello). In particular, I will present in form of a survey the following
topics and results: 1.) queries and constraint satisfaction problems of
bounded hypertree width can be solved in polynomial time (actually, the
complexity is in LOGCFL). Hypergraphs of bounded hypertree width can be
recognized in polynomial time and a hypertree decomposition of such a hypergraph
graph can be computed in polynomial time. Hypertree decompositions generalize
all other notions of hypergraph decompositions that have been used for
defining polynomial classes of database queries or constraint satisfaction
problems. The hypertree width of a graph has a nice game-theoretic characterization.
Queries of bounded hypertree width correspond to an interesting fragment
of First Order Logic. Hypertree width generalizes clique width (of the
incidence graph of a hypergraph).
Martin Hofmann: The strength of non-size increasing computation
In this talk we describe a system [1,3] for defining recursive functions
on inductive data structures such as lists or trees which has the
intrinsic property that all definable functions are hereditarily non-size
increasing so that evaluation in a finite model yields the correct result.
Apart from being of foundational interest the system has applications to
space-efficient evaluation of functional programs.
We determine the expressive power of the system and some subsystems, in
particular, we show that a function is definable with general recursion
and higher-order linear functions iff it is computable in time
O(2^p(n)) for some polynomial p. Replacing general recursion with
structural recursion reduces the strength to polynomial time.
The latter improves upon an earlier result by Aehlig and Schwichtenberg
[2] who showed that all polynomial-time functions are definable using a
certain ad-hoc extension.
[1] Martin Hofmann. Linear types and non size-increasing polynomial
time computation. To appear in Theoretical Compjuter Science 2001. An
extended abstract has appeared in Proc. Symp. Logic in Comp. Sci..
(LICS) 1999, Trento
[2] Klaus Aehlig and Helmut Schwichtenberg. A syntactical analysis of
non-size-increasing polynomial time computation. Proc. Symp.
on Logic in Comp. Sci. (LICS '00), Santa Barbara, 2000.
[3] Martin Hofmann. A type system for bounded space and
functional in-place update. To appear in the Nordic Journal of
Computing. An extended abstract has appeared in "Programming Languages
and Systems", G. Smolka, ed. Springer LNCS, 2000.
Peter Hoyer: Introduction to recent quantum algorithms
We discuss some of the recent progress in quantum algorithmics. We
review most of the primary techniques used in proving upper and lower
bounds and illustrate how to apply the techniques to a variety of
problems, including the threshold function, parity, searching and
sorting. We also give a set of open questions and possible future
research directions. Our aim is to give a basic overview and we
include suggestions to further reading.
Dana Randall: Decomposition Methods for Markov Chain Analysis
Decomposition methods have been valuable tools for bounding convergence
rates of Markov chains. The "State Decomposition Theorem" allows the state
space of a Markov chain to be decomposed into pieces, and it shows that
if some Markov chain is rapidly mixing when restricted to each of the pieces,
and if there is good mixing between the pieces, then the original Markov
chain must be rapidly mixing as well. The "Density Decomposition Theorem"
provides a similar relation between the mixing rates of Markov chains
with varying stationary distributions and a composite Markov chain which
represents their weighted average. These theorems are useful because they
allow a top-down approach to analyzing mixing rates by simplifying the chains.
Moreover, they allow one to use a hybrid approach convergence rate analysis
whereby different methods can be used to bound convergence rates of each
of the pieces. In this talk we will survey these methods and give several
recent applications of these techniques, including sampling returning
walks in Cayley trees and the Gibbs states of the mean field Ising model.
Uwe Schoening: New Algorithms for k-SAT using the
local search principle
In the last years several new deterministic and probabilistic algorithms
have been developped for the k-SAT Problem. Their running times beat the
previously known algorithms based on several versions of backtracking.
The fastest known algorithm for 3-SAT achieves complexity 1.33^n.
Thomas Wilke: Linear Temporal Logic and Finite
Semigroups
The main building blocks of temporal logic (as it used to specify properties
of reactive systems) are operators for expressing simple temporal
relationships such as "something happens until something else happens" or
"something happens from now on". Often enough, when one tries to cast a
seemingly simple temporal property in temporal logic, one experiences that the
formulas one comes up with are complicated in one way or the other - they
might be very long or deeply nested or use many binary operators. This raises
the question if it is possible to determine for a given temporal property how
simple a formula expressing it can be. This can also be phrased differently,
in a more formal way. Given a temporal property, find natural fragments of
temporal logic in which it can be expressed. Natural can, for instance, mean
"without using binary operators" or "without referring to the next position".
The key to solving these problems is to view temporal properties as sets of
finite or infinite words, that is, as formal languages, and to apply the
algebraic theory of formal languages. The talk will give an introduction to
the field and survey the important results.
Last changed June 12, 2001.