Special Issue On Foundations Of Computer Science

This volume comprises the polished and fully refereed versions of a selection of papers presented at the Forty-Sixth Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2005), held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 23-25, 2005. Unrefereed preliminary versions of the papers presented at the symposium appeared in the proceedings of the meeting, published by IEEE. The FOCS 2005 Program Committee consisted of Ziv Bar-Yossef, Paul Beame, Ran Canetti, Irit Dinur, Ashish Goel, Venkatesan Guruswami, Sariel Har-Peled, Michael Kearns, Richard Lipton, Frank McSherry, Satish Rao, Omer Reingold, Eva Tardos, Mikkel Thorup, Berthold Voecking, John Watrous, Mihalis Yannakakis, and David Zuckerman. Of 276 extended abstracts submitted to the FOCS 2005 Program Committee, 62 were selected for presentation at the symposium. Eight of those 62 papers are included in this volume. This collection encompasses a wide variety of topics and methods in theoretical computer science, often shedding new light on entire areas with a fresh approach. The topics include algorithms, learning, property testing, combinatorics, cryptography, and distributed and quantum computing. All papers were refereed in accordance with SICOMP's stringent standards, and most were substantially updated in the process. We take this opportunity to thank all the referees whose anonymous work has significantly contributed to the value of this volume. It was an honor to edit this special section in SIAM Journal on Computing .