Reactive systems are becoming more and more important for essentially all areas of technical and professional activities as well as for many areas of everyday life. The design of these systems is a great challenge and requires sound compromises between safety and time-to-market. To meet these needs, early design phases nowadays include verification of given specifications against system descriptions to find potential design errors as early as possible.

This book is devoted to the foundation of the most popular formal methods for the specification and verification of reactive systems. In...

Personal motivation. The dream of creating artificial devices that reach or outperform human inteUigence is an old one. It is also one of the dreams of my youth, which have never left me. What makes this challenge so interesting? A solution would have enormous implications on our society, and there are reasons to believe that the AI problem can be solved in my expected lifetime. So, it's worth sticking to it for a lifetime, even if it takes 30 years or so to reap the benefits. The AI problem. The science of artificial intelligence (AI) may be defined as the construction of intelligent systems...

Modern cryptology increasingly employs mathematically rigorous concepts and methods from complexity theory. Conversely, current research topics in complexity theory are often motivated by questions and problems from cryptology. This book takes account of this situation, and therefore its subject is what may be dubbed "cryptocomplexity'', a kind of symbiosis of these two areas.

This book is written for undergraduate and graduate students of computer science, mathematics, and engineering, and can be used for courses on complexity theory and cryptology, preferably by stressing their...

The first edition of the monograph Information and Randomness: An Algorithmic Perspective by Crist ian Calude was published in 1994. In my Foreword I said: "The research in algorithmic information theory is already some 30 years old. However, only the recent years have witnessed a really vigorous growth in this area. . . . The present book by Calude fits very well in our series. Much original research is presented. . . making the approach richer in consequences than the classical one. Remarkably, however, the text is so self-contained and coherent that the book may also serve as a textbook....

Algorithmic design, especially for hard problems, is more essential for success in solving them than any standard improvement of current computer tech- nologies. Because of this, the design of algorithms for solving hard problems is the core of current algorithmic research from the theoretical point of view as well as from the practical point of view. There are many general text books on algorithmics, and several specialized books devoted to particular approaches such as local search, randomization, approximation algorithms, or heuristics. But there is no textbook that focuses on the design...

The communication complexity of two-party protocols is an only 15 years old complexity measure, but it is already considered to be one of the fundamen- tal complexity measures of recent complexity theory. Similarly to Kolmogorov complexity in the theory of sequential computations, communication complex- ity is used as a method for the study of the complexity of concrete computing problems in parallel information processing. Especially, it is applied to prove lower bounds that say what computer resources (time, hardware, memory size) are necessary to compute the given task. Besides the...

The foundations of computational complexity theory go back to Alan Thring in the 1930s who was concerned with the existence of automatic procedures deciding the validity of mathematical statements. The first example of such a problem was the undecidability of the Halting Problem which is essentially the question of debugging a computer program: Will a given program eventu- ally halt? Computational complexity today addresses the quantitative aspects of the solutions obtained: Is the problem to be solved tractable? But how does one measure the intractability of computation? Several ideas were...

The book contains a completely new presentation of classical results in the field of Lambda Calculus, together with new results. The text is unique in that it presents a new calculus (Parametric Lambda Calculus) which can be instantiated to obtain already known lambda-calculi. Some properties, which in the literature have been proved separately for different calculi, can be proved once for the Parametric one. The lambda calculi are presented from a Computer Science point of view, with a particular emphasis on their semantics, both operational and denotational.

Sex differences are observed in various physiological, behavioral, and psychic functions, including reproductive behavior, aggres- sion, emotions, and cognition. Such differences are expressed even in early childhood with preferences to definite activities. It has been generally accepted that differences between genders are formed under the influence of biological as well as environmental factors. The existence of sex differences in functions of the central nervous system has suggested that there are also morphological sex differences. In recent years several reports on sexual dimorphism in...

Die vergangenen Jahrzehnte waren in der medizinrechtlichen Diskussion gepragt von der Herausarbeitung von Aufklarungspflichten und der Feststellung von Behandlungsstandards. Unbeachtet blieb die zentrale Frage nach der medizinischen Notwendigkeit einer Leistung. Das Symposium will diese Fragestellung in ihren ethischen, verfassungsrechtlichen und leistungsrechtlichen Aspekten aufarbeiten und zu einer Klarung beitragen.