Allon G. Percus, Gabriel Istrate, Cristopher Moore, eds.
Computational Complexity and Statistical Physics.
OUP. 2006
Computer science and physics have been closely linked since the birth of modern computing.
In recent years, an interdisciplinary area has blossomed at the junction of these fields,
connecting insights from statistical physics with basic computational challenges.
Researchers have successfully applied techniques from the study of phase transitions
to analyze NP-complete problems such as satisfiability and graph coloring.
This is leading to a new understanding of the structure of these problems, and of how algorithms perform on them.
Computational Complexity and Statistical Physics will serve as a standard reference and pedagogical aid to statistical physics methods in computer science, with a particular focus on phase transitions in combinatorial problems. Addressed to a broad range of readers, the book includes substantial background material along with current research by leading computer scientists, mathematicians, and physicists. It will prepare students and researchers from all of these fields to contribute to this exciting area.
Contents
- • Introduction: where statistical physics meets computation. 2006
- • Gil Kalai, Shmuel Safra. Threshold phenomena and influence: perspectives from mathematics, computer science, and economics. 2006
- • Simona Cocca, Remi Monasson, Andrea Montanari, Guilhem Semerjian. Analyzing search algorithms with physical methods. 2006
- • Alfredo Bausnstein, Marc Mezard, Martin Weigt, Riccardo Zecchina. Constraint satisfaction by survey propagation. 2006
- • Stephan Mertens. The easiest hard problem: number partitioning. 2006
- • Sigismund Kobe, Jarek Krawczyk. Ground states, energy landscape, and low-temperature dynamics of +/-J spin glasses. 2006
- • Lefteris M. Kirousis, Yannis C. Stamatiou, Michele Zito. The satisfiability threshold conjecture: techniques behind upper bound improvements. 2006
- • Alexis C. Kaporis, Lefteris M. Kirousis, Yannis C. Stamatiou. Proving conditional randomness using the principla of deferred decisions. 2006
- • Demetrios D. Demopoulos, Moshe Y. Vardi. The phase transition in the random HornSAT problem. 2006
- • Tad Hogg. Phase transitions for quantum search algorithms. 2006
- • Zoltan Toroczkai, Gyorgy Korniss, Mark A. Novotny, Hasan Guclu. Scalability, random surfaces, and synchronized computing networks. 2006
- • Christian M. Reidys. Combinatorics of genotype-phenotype maps: an RNA case study. 2006
- • Harry B. Hunt III, Madhav V. Marathe, Daniel J. Rozenkrantz, Richard E. Stearns. Towards a predictive computational complexity theory for periodically specified problems: a survey. 2006