# Tag Info

474

Algorithms that are the main driver behind a system are, in my opinion, easier to find in non-algorithms courses for the same reason theorems with immediate applications are easier to find in applied mathematics rather than pure mathematics courses. It is rare for a practical problem to have the exact structure of the abstract problem in a lecture. To be ...

343

I have personally enjoyed several Aha! moments from studying basic automata theory. NFAs and DFAs form a microcosm for theoretical computer science as a whole. Does Non-determinism Lead to Efficiency? There are standard examples where the minimal deterministic automaton for a language is exponentially larger than a minimal non-deterministic automaton. ...

96

$\lambda$-calculus has two key roles. It is a simple mathematical foundation of sequential, functional, higher-order computational behaviour. It is a representation of proofs in constructive logic. This is also known as the Curry-Howard correspondence. Jointly, the dual view of $\lambda$-calculus as proof and as (sequential, functional, higher-order) ...

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If you really want to know what led Neil Robertson and me to tree-width, it wasn't algorithms at all. We were trying to solve Wagner's conjecture that in any infinite set of graphs, one of them is a minor of another, and we were right at the beginning. We knew it was true if we restricted to graphs with no k-vertex path; let me explain why. We knew all such ...

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Strassen's statement needs to be put into context. This was an address to an audience of mathematicians in 1986, a time when many mathematicians did not have a high opinion of theoretical computer science. The complete statement is For some of you it may seem that the theories discussed here rest on weak foundations. They do not. The evidence in favor of ...

47

My impression is that, by and large, traditional algebra is rather too specific for use in Computer Science. So Computer Scientists either use weaker (and, hence, more general) structures, or generalize the traditional structures so that they can fit them to their needs. We also use category theory a lot, which mathematicians don't think of as being part ...

44

To complete the other answers: I think that Turing Machine are a better abstraction of what computers do than finite automata. Indeed, the main difference between the two models is that with finite automata, we expect to treat data that is bigger than the state space, and Turing Machine are a model for the other way around (state space >> data) by making the ...

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PageRank is one of the best-known such algorithms. Developed by Google co-founder Larry Page and co-authors, it formed the basis of Google's original search engine and is widely credited with helping them to achieve better search results than their competitors at the time. We imagine a "random surfer" starting at some webpage, and repeatedly clicking a ...

33

There are many good theoretical reasons to study N/DFAs. Two that immediately come to mind are: Turing machines (we think) capture everything that's computable. However, we can ask: What parts of a Turing machine are "essential"? What happens when you limit a Turing machine in various ways? DFAs are a very severe and natural limitation (taking away ...

33

I would mention the widely-used software CPLEX (or similar) implementation of the Simplex method/algorithm for solving linear programming problems. It is the (?) most used algorithm in economy and operations research. "If one would take statistics about which mathematical problem is using up most of the computer time in the world, then (not counting ...

33

A flip answer is that this isn't the first thing about complexity theory that I'd try to explain to a layperson! To even appreciate the idea of nonuniformity, and how it differs from nondeterminism, you need to be further down in the weeds with the definitions of complexity classes than many people are willing to get. Having said that, one perspective that ...

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There are two approaches when considering this question: historical that pertains to how concepts were discovered and technical which explains why certain concepts were adopted and others abandoned or even forgotten. Historically, the Turing Machine is perhaps the most intuitive model of several developed trying to answer the Entscheidungsproblem. This is ...

31

To add one more perspective to the rest of the answers: because you can actually do stuff with finite automata, in contrast with Turing machines. Just about any interesting property of Turing machines are undecidable. On the contrary, with finite automata, just about everything is decidable. Language equality, inclusion, emptiness and universality are all ...

30

As I understand it, the National Resident Matching Program was for a long time just a straight application of the Gale-Shapley algorithm for the stable marriage problem. It has since been slightly updated to handle some extra details like spousal assignments (aka the "two-body problem"), etc...

29

There's an algorithm for multiplying an $N \times N^{0.172}$ matrix with an $N^{0.172} \times N$ matrix in $N^2 \operatorname{polylog}\left(N\right)$ arithmetic operations. The main identity used for it comes from Coppersmith's paper "Rapid multiplication of rectangular matrices", but the explanation for why it leads to $N^2 \operatorname{polylog}\left(N\... 28 Here is a "smoothness" argument that I heard recently in defense of the claim that non-uniform models of computation should be more powerful than we suspect. On one hand, we know from the time hierarchy theorem that there are functions computable in time$O(2^{2n})$that are not computable in time$O(2^{n})$, for example. On the other hand, by Lupanov's ... 28 Grothendieck's inequality, from his days in functional analysis, was initially proved to relate fundamental norms on tensor product spaces. Grothendieck called the inequality "the fundamental theorem of the metric theory of tensor product spaces", and published it in a now famous paper in 1958, in French, in a limited circulation Brazilian journal. The paper ... 27 State. you need to learn that one can model the world (for certain problems) as a finite state space, and one can think about computation in this settings. This is a simple insight but extremely useful if you do any programming - you would encounter state again and again and again, and FA give you a way to think about them. I consider this to be a sufficient ... 27 I think$\lambda$-calculus has contributed in many ways to this field, and still contributes to it. Three examples follow, and this is not exhaustive. Since I am not a specialist in$\lambda$-calculus, I certainly miss some important points. First, I think having different models of computation that turn out to represent the exact same set of functions was ... 26 He wanted to create a formal system for the foundations of logic and mathematics that was simpler than Russell's type theory and Zermelo's set theory. The basic idea was to add a constant$\Xi$to the untyped lambda calculus (or combinatory logic) and interpret$XZ$as expressing "$Z$satisfies the predicate$X$" and$\Xi XY$as expressing "$X\subseteq Y$". ... 25 Bhatnagar, Gopalan, and Lipton show that, assuming the abc conjecture, there are polynomials of degree$O((kn)^{1/2+\varepsilon})$representing the Threshold-of-$k$function over${\mathbb Z}_6$. For fixed constant$k$, and$m$which has$t$prime factors, the abc conjecture implies a polynomial for Threshold-of-$k$over$\mathbb Z_m$with degree$O(n^{1/t+\...

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It's not a single problem, but the entire field of analytic combinatorics (see the book by Flajolet and Sedgewick) explores how to analyze the combinatorial complexity of counting structures (or even algorithm running times) by writing down an appropriate generating function and analyzing the structure of the complex solutions.

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If you're also including PhD-level stuff, many (most?) graduate CS programs include some course in coding theory. If you have a course in coding theory, you will definitely cover the Reed-Solomon code which is integral to how compact discs work and Huffman encoding which is used in JPEG, MP3, and ZIP file formats. Depending on the orientation of the course, ...

24

Very briefly: the simply-typed $\lambda$-calculus does not have dependent types. Dependent types were proposed by de Bruijn and Howard who wanted to extend the Curry-Howard correspondence from propositional to first-order logic. The key contribution of Martin-Löf's is a novel analysis of equality. There are two main ways of giving Curry-Howard style ...

23

My all-time favorite application of group theory in TCS is Barrington's Theorem. You can find an exposition of this theorem on the complexity blog, and Barrington's exposition in the comment section of that post.

22

Here's an argument that one-way functions should be hard to invert. Suppose there is a class of 3-SAT problems with planted solutions that are hard to solve. Consider the following map: $$(x, r) \rightarrow s$$ where $x$ is any string of bits, $r$ is a string of bits (you could use these to seed a random number generator, or you can ask for as many random ...

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this paper points out that computing the reciprocal square root value using floating point representation is widespread in CS applications ("very common in scientific computations"); the authors show that a more efficient formula is possible for computing the correctly rounded value if the ABC conjecture holds. [1] The abc conjecture and correctly rounded ...

21

I strongly disagree with the last paragraph. Blanket statements like that are not useful. If you look at papers in many systems areas such as networking, databases, AI and so on you will see that plenty of approximation algorithms are used in practice. There are some problems for which one desires very accurate answers; for example say an airline interesting ...

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It's a little vague, but I like the question. I wrote a paper about it a LONG time ago. Maybe this will help the Anonymous questioner: Brute Force Search and Oracle-Based Computation Here's a summary. Informally, if you do not keep any scratch work from previous trials, and just try all possible solutions in lexicographical order until a desired ...

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Although it is not really the reason they were originally studied, finite automata and the regular languages they recognize are tractable enough that they have been used as building blocks for more complicated mathematical theories. In this context see particularly automatic groups (groups in which the elements can be represented by strings in a regular ...

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