There has been a common perception that computational complexity is a theory of "bad news" because its most typical results assert that various real-world and innocent-looking tasks are infeasible. In fact, "bad news" is a relative term, and, indeed, in some situations (e.g., in cryptography), we want an adversary to not be able to perform a certain task. However, a "bad news" result does not automatically become useful in such a scenario. For this to happen, its hardness features have to be quantitatively evaluated and shown to manifest extensively.The book undertakes a quantitative analysis of some of the major results in complexity that regard either classes of problems or individual concrete problems. The size of some important classes are studied using resource-bounded topological and measure-theoretical tools. In the case of individual problems, the book studies relevant quantitative attributes such as approximation properties or the number of hard inputs at each length.One chapter is dedicated to abstract complexity theory, an older field which, however, deserves attention because it lays out the foundations of complexity. The other chapters, on the other hand, focus on recent and important developments in complexity. The book presents in a fairly detailed manner concepts that have been at the centre of the main research lines in complexity in the last decade or so, such as: average-complexity, quantum computation, hardness amplification, resource-bounded measure, the relation between one-way functions and pseudo-random generators, the relation between hard predicates and pseudo-random generators, extractors, derandomization of bounded-error probabilistic algorithms, probabilistically checkable proofs, non-approximability of optimization problems, and others.The book should appeal to graduate computer science students, and to researchers who have an interest in computer science theory and need a good understanding of computational complexity, e.g., researchers in algorithms, AI, logic, and other disciplines.·Emphasis is on relevant quantitative attributes of important results in complexity.·Coverage is self-contained and accessible to a wide audience.·Large range of important topics including: derandomization techniques, non-approximability of optimization problems, average-case complexity, quantum computation, one-way functions and pseudo-random generators, resource-bounded measure and topology.

Computational Complexity Theory is the study of how much of a given resource is required to perform the computations that interest us the most. Four decades of fruitful research have produced a rich and subtle theory of the relationship between different resource measures and problems. At the core of the theory are some of the most alluring open problems in mathematics. This book presents three weeks of lectures from the IAS/Park City Mathematics Institute Summer School on computational complexity. The first week gives a general introduction to the field, including descriptions of the basic mo.

Computational Complexity Theory is the study of how much of a given resource is required to perform the computations that interest us the most. Four decades of fruitful research have produced a rich and subtle theory of the relationship between different resource measures and problems. At the core of the theory are some of the most alluring open problems in mathematics. This book presents three weeks of lectures from the IAS/Park City Mathematics Institute Summer School on computational complexity. The first week gives a general introduction to the field, including descriptions of the basic mo.

This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Computational Learning Theory, COLT 2003, and the 7th Kernel Workshop, Kernel 2003, held in Washington, DC in August 2003. The 47 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited contributions and 8 open problem statements were carefully reviewed and selected from 92 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on kernel machines, statistical learning theory, online learning, other approaches, and inductive inference learning.