BEATCS No 115
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ISSN 0252–9742 Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science EATCS E A T C S Number 115 February 2015 Council of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science President:Luca Aceto Iceland Vice Presidents:Paul Spirakis Greece Burkhard Monien Germany Antonin Kucera Czech Republic Treasurer:Dirk Janssens Belgium Bulletin Editor:Kazuo Iwama Kyoto,Japan Lars Arge Denmark Elvira Mayordomo Spain Jos Baeten The Netherlands Luke Ong UK Paul Beame USA Catuscia Palamidessi France Mikolaj Bojanczyk Poland David Peleg Israel Josep D´iaz Spain Giuseppe Persiano Italy Zoltan´ Ésik Hungary Alberto Policriti Italy Fedor Fomin Norway Alberto Marchetti Spaccamela Italy Pierre Fraigniaud France Vladimiro Sassone UK Leslie Ann Goldberg UK Roger Wattenhofer Switzerland Monika Henzinger Austria Thomas Wilke Germany Christos Kaklamanis Greece Peter Widmayer Switzerland Juhani Karhumaki Finland Gerhard Woeginger¨ The Netherlands Past Presidents: Maurice Nivat (1972–1977)Mike Paterson (1977–1979) Arto Salomaa (1979–1985)Grzegorz Rozenberg (1985–1994) Wilfred Brauer (1994–1997)Josep D´iaz (1997–2002) Mogens Nielsen (2002–2006)Giorgio Ausiello (2006–2009) Burkhard Monien (2009–2012) Secretary Office:Ioannis Chatzigiannakis Greece Efi Chita Greece EATCS Council Members email addresses Luca Aceto ..................................... [email protected] Lars Arge .............................. [email protected] Jos Baeten ............................... [email protected] Paul Beame .......................... [email protected] Mikolaj Bojanczyk .......................... [email protected] Josep D´iaz .................................. [email protected] Zoltan´ Ésik .............................. [email protected] Fedor Fomin ................................ [email protected] Pierre Fraigniaud .. [email protected] Leslie Ann Goldberg ................ [email protected] Monika Henzinger ................ [email protected] Dirk Janssens ......................... [email protected] Christos Kaklamanis ...................... [email protected] Juhani Karhumaki¨ .......................... [email protected] Antonin Kucera .............................. [email protected] Elvira Mayordomo ............................ [email protected] Burkhard Monien ......................... [email protected] Luke Ong .............................. [email protected] Catuscia Palamidessi .............. [email protected] David Peleg ...................... [email protected] Giuseppe Persiano ........................ [email protected] Alberto Policriti ................... [email protected] Alberto Marchetti Spaccamela .............. [email protected] Vladimiro Sassone .......................... [email protected] Roger Wattenhofer ................. [email protected] Thomas Wilke ................. [email protected] Peter Widmayer ......................... [email protected] Gerhard Woeginger¨ .............. [email protected] Bulletin Editor: Kazuo Iwama, Kyoto, Japan Cartoons: DADARA, Amsterdam, The Netherlands The bulletin is entirely typeset by pdfTEX and ConTEXt in TXfonts. All contributions are to be sent electronically to [email protected] and must be prepared in LATEX 2" using the class beatcs.cls (a version of the standard LATEX 2" article class). All sources, including figures, and a reference PDF version must be bundled in a ZIP file. Pictures are accepted in EPS, JPG, PNG, TIFF, MOV or, preferably, in PDF. Photographic reports from conferences must be arranged in ZIP files layed out according to the format described at the Bulletin’s web site. Please, consult http://www.eatcs.org/bulletin/howToSubmit.html. We regret we are unfortunately not able to accept submissions in other for- mats, or indeed submission not strictly adhering to the page and font layout set out in beatcs.cls. We shall also not be able to include contributions not typeset at camera-ready quality. The details can be found at http://www.eatcs.org/bulletin, including class files, their documentation, and guidelines to deal with things such as pictures and overfull boxes. When in doubt, email [email protected]. Deadlines for submissions of reports are January, May and September 15th, respectively for the February, June and October issues. Editorial decisions about submitted technical contributions will normally be made in 6/8 weeks. Accepted papers will appear in print as soon as possible thereafter. The Editor welcomes proposals for surveys, tutorials, and thematic issues of the Bulletin dedicated to currently hot topics, as well as suggestions for new regular sections. The EATCS home page is http://www.eatcs.org Table of Contents EATCS MATTERS Letter from the President ............................... 3 Letter from the Bulletin Editor ........................ 9 EATCS Award 2015 ....................................... 13 EATCS COLUMNS The Algorithmics Column, by G.J Woeginger K-Best Enumeration, by D. Eppstein ..................... 19 The Computational Complexity Column, by V. Arvind Robust Oracle Machines revisited, by V. Arvind . 45 The Distributed Computing Column, by P. Fatourou and by S. Schmid A Closer Look at Concurrent Data Structures and Algorithms, by G. Taubenfeld ....................... 59 Local Coordination and Symmetry Breaking, by J. Suomela . 83 The Education Column, by J. Hromkovič Homo Informaticus, by J. Hromkovič . 111 The Logics in Computer Science Column, by Y. Gurevich Negative Probability, by A. Blass . 125 News and Conference Reports News from New Zealand, by C.S. Calude . 147 Russian Chapter of European Association for Theoretical Computer Science . 165 Report on CPM 2014 .................................... 167 Report on UCNC 2012 ................................... 169 Announcements IWOCA 2015 in Verona, Italy . 177 E. W. Beth Dissertation Prize 2015 Call for Nominations ............................................. 179 EATCS LEAFLET ......................................... 183 viii EATCS Matters E A T C S The Bulletin of the EATCS Letter from the President Dear colleagues, First of all, let me wish you a belated happy 2015. I hope that this will be a healthy and fruitful year for all of you, and I look forward to working together with all of you in order to continue promoting the development of theoretical computer science, broadly construed, and to increase the influence of the EATCS within the theoretical-computer-science community. I hope that many of you will submit their best work to ICALP 2015 (deadline: Tuesday, 17 February 2015). As you know, ICALP 2015 will be held in Kyoto, Japan, and will be co-located with LICS 2015. It promises to be a mouthwatering scientific meeting, with five invited talks (two joint with LICS 2015) delivered by Ken Kawarabayashi (NII, Japan), Valerie King (University of Victoria, Canada), Thomas Moscibroda (MSR Asia, China), Anca Muscholl (Université Bordeaux, France) and Peter O'Hearn (Facebook, UK) as well as a masterclass on algoritms and complexity for Japanese puzzles by Ryuhei Uehara (JAIST, Japan) and three invited tutorials (joint with LICS) that will be presented by Piotr Indyk (MIT, USA), Andrew Pitts (University of Cambridge, UK) and Geoffrey Smith (Florida International University, USA). I am happy to inform you that the EATCS Awards Committee 2015 consisting of Fedor Fomin, Kim G. Larsen and Vladimiro Sassone (chair) has selected Christos Papadimitriou (UC Berkeley, USA) as the recipient of the EATCS Award 2015. Congratulations to Christos! The award, which is given to acknowledge extensive and widely recognized 3 BEATCS no 115 contributions to theoretical computer science over a life-long scientific career, will be presented to Christos at ICALP 2015. Moreover, during the conference, we will hand out the Presburger Award 2015 and honour the EATCS Fellows vintage 2015. If that weren't enough to whet your scientific appetite, ICALP 2015 will also feature a couple of events to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the journal Theoretical Computer Science. More details about this celebration will be available in due course on the ICALP/LICS 2015 web site at http: //www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/icalp-lics2015/. ICALP 2016 will be held in Rome, Italy, and Tiziana Calamoneri and her team are already busy working on the organization of the conference. The PC chairs for ICALP 2016 will be Yuval Rabani (Track A), Davide Sangiorgi (Track B) and Michael Mitzenmacher (Track C). On behalf of the community, I thank these colleagues for accepting this demanding responsibility. As usual, the call for papers for ICALP 2016 will be ready for distribution at ICALP 2015. As you might know already, from ICALP 2016 there will be an important change in the publication of the proceedings of ICALP. Since the contract between the EATCS and Springer will expire at the end of 2015, the council of the EATCS has discussed the publication outlet for the proceedings of ICALP from 2016. Based on the discussion and on the ensuing vote, the council of the EATCS has decided that, starting from ICALP 2016, the proceedings of ICALP will be published in open-access form in LIPIcs (Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics). 4 The Bulletin of the EATCS The EATCS has had a long and good working relationship with Springer, which we really appreciate. However, the council overwhelmingly thought that it is time for a change, as far as the publication of the proceedings of ICALP is concerned, and that it was best