This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 24th International Conference on the Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, FSTTCS 2004, held in Chennai, India, in December 2004. The 35 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 176 submissions. The papers address a broad variety of current issues in software science, programming theory, systems design and analysis, formal methods, mathematical logic, mathematical foundations, discrete mathematics, combinatorial mathematics, complexity theory, automata theory, and theoretical computer science in general.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, FST TCS 2003, held in Mumbai, India in December 2003. The 23 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers and the abstract of an invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 160 submissions. A broad variety of current topics from the theory of computing are addressed, ranging from algorithmics and discrete mathematics to logics and programming theory.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th International Conference on the Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, FSTTCS 2005, held in Hyderabad, India, in December 2005. The 38 revised full papers presented together with 7 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 167 submissions. A broad variety of current topics from the theory of computing are addressed, ranging from software science, programming theory, systems design and analysis, formal methods, mathematical logic, mathematical foundations, discrete mathematics, combinatorial mathematics, complexity theory, and automata theory to theoretical computer science in general.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 27th International Conference on the Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, FSTTCS 2007, held in New Delhi, India, in December 2007. The 40 revised full papers presented together with five invited papers were carefully reviewed. They provide original research results in fundamental aspects of computer science and reports from the frontline of software technology and theoretical computer science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 26th International Conference on the Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, FSTTCS 2006, held in Kolkata, India, in December 2006. It contains 38 papers that cover a broad variety of current topics from the theory of computing, ranging from formal methods, discrete mathematics, complexity theory, and automata theory to theoretical computer science in general.

Looking at a sequence of zeros and ones, we often feel that it is not random, that is, it is not plausible as an outcome of fair coin tossing. Why? The answer is provided by algorithmic information theory: because the sequence is compressible, that is, it has small complexity or, equivalently, can be produced by a short program. This idea, going back to Solomonoff, Kolmogorov, Chaitin, Levin, and others, is now the starting point of algorithmic information theory. The first part of this book is a textbook-style exposition of the basic notions of complexity and randomness; the second part covers some recent work done by participants of the “Kolmogorov seminar” in Moscow (started by Kolmogorov himself in the 1980s) and their colleagues. This book contains numerous exercises (embedded in the text) that will help readers to grasp the material.