Springer Complexity Theory Retrospective II (Springer Series in Statistics)

Readers of Complexity Theory Retrospective (published by Springer-Verlag in 1990) will remember that the collection consisted primarily of articles that first ap peared in preliminary form at one of the meetings of the Annual IEEE Conference on Structure in Complexity Theory. In particular, Complexity Theory Retrospective contained final versions of high-quality technical expository presentations, includ ing talks that honored Juris Hartmanis on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. We began planning for the current collection some months before the scheduled meeting in 1994 of the Tenth Annual IEEE Conference on Structure in Complexity Theory. As with the original volume, several of the papers in this book originated as presentations at one of the meetings of the Structure in Complexity Theory con ference. We are pleased to provide this forum for final, polished versions of these papers. As it turns out, 1994 was a watershed year for the Structures conference, for at this meeting the conference attendees voted to change the conference name to its current name, the Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complex ity. In voting to remove the expression "Structure in," the conferees recognized the recent explosion of techniques and results in computational complexity, and expressed concern that the original conference name might not accurately reflect the current status. We approached this volume in the same spirit.