People are facing more and more NP-complete or NP-hard problems of a combinatorial nature and of a continuous nature in economic, military and management practice. There are two ways in which one can enhance the efficiency of searching for the solutions of these problems. The first is to improve the speed and memory capacity of hardware. We all have witnessed the computer industry's amazing achievements with hardware and software developments over the last twenty years. On one hand many computers, bought only a few years ago, are being sent to elementary schools for children to learn the...

This volume is the proceedings of the fifth International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation, ISAAC '94, held in Beijing, China in August 1994.
The 79 papers accepted for inclusion in the volume after a careful reviewing process were selected from a total of almost 200 submissions. Besides many internationally renowned experts, a number of excellent Chinese researchers present their results to the international scientific community for the first time here. The volume covers all relevant theoretical and many applicational aspects of algorithms and computation.