Special Issue On The Thirty-Eighth Annual Acm Symposium On Theory Of Computing (Stoc 2006)

In keeping with an annual tradition, this issue of the SIAM Journal on Computing contains extended versions of selected papers from the Thirty-Eighth Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2006), which was held May 21-23, 2006, in Seattle, Washington. The conference program included 78 papers selected by a program committee consisting of Scott Aaronson, Eli Ben-Sasson, Allan Borodin, David Eppstein, Sudipto Guha, Piotr Indyk, Jon Kleinberg, Tal Malkin, Frank McSherry, Dieter van Melkebeek, Michael Mitzenmacher, Assaf Naor, Rafail Ostrovsky, Toniann Pitassi, R. Ravi, Dana Ron, Amin Saberi, Amit Sahai, Rocco Servedio, and Madhu Sudan. Preliminary versions of these papers appeared in the conference proceedings published by ACM Press. This special issue contains 11 of these papers; the authors were invited by the program committee to prepare extended versions of their papers, which were then refereed according to the journal's high standards. In the process, these papers were considerably revised and expanded. Collectively, they represent some of the recent highlights from a broad cross-section of active areas within theoretical computer science, including randomness in computation, approximation algorithms and inapproximability, proof complexity, property testing, constraint satisfaction, quantum computing, algorithmic game theory, and high-dimensional geometric algorithms. In total, the six of us listed below handled the editing of these papers. We would like to thank all of the referees and the full program committee for their contributions to the preparation of this special issue.