Special Issue Dedicated to the Thirty-Seventh Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2005)

This volume comprises the polished and fully refereed versions of a selection of papers presented at the Thirty-Seventh Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2005), held in Baltimore, Maryland, May 22-24, 2005. Unrefereed preliminary versions of the papers presented at the symposium appeared in the proceedings of the meeting, published by ACM. The symposium was sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT). The STOC 2005 Program Committee consisted of Gerth Stolting Brodal, Harry Buhrman, Jin-Yi Cai, Cynthia Dwork, Ronald Fagin (chair), Martin Farach-Colton, Anupam Gupta, Sariel Har-Peled, Russell Impagliazzo, Kamal Jain, Adam Tauman Kalai, David Karger, Claire Kenyon, Subhash Khot, Ravi Kumar, Moni Naor, Ryan O'Donnell, Toniann Pitassi, Tim Roughgarden, Alistair Sinclair, and Amnon Ta-Shma. Out of 290 “Extended Abstracts” submitted to the STOC 2005 Program Committee, 84 were selected for presentation at the symposium. The present volume includes 9 of these papers that were invited to this volume. All papers were refereed in accordance with the SIAM Journal on Computing's stringent standards, and these papers were substantially updated in the process. We take this opportunity to thank all the referees whose anonymous work has significantly contributed to the value of this volume. Ronald Fagin, the Program Chair of the 2005 STOC Conference, invited three other members of the Program Committee (Anupam Gupta, Ravi Kumar, and Ryan O'Donnell) to assist in editing this special issue of the of the SIAM Journal on Computing, and all agreed. We feel that it was an honor to edit this issue.