CS 6520, Computational Complexity : Home Page

Georgia Inst. of Technology
College of Computing

CS 6520
Computational Complexity
Subhash Khot

Spring 2007

General Information and Announcements

Keep looking for updates. It is your responsibility to watch out for announcements regarding homeworks, exams, handouts etc. No emails will be sent.

List of course projects

Prerequisites

Prior knowledge of following materials is assumed. Taking CS 3500 and/or CS 3510 should cover most of this material. A brief overview of basics will be given in the first lecture. Other than this, the course should be self-contained.

Discrete math and probability.
Data structures : lists, trees, stacks etc.
Algorithms, asymptotic running time, basic algorithms like breadth/depth-first search, sorting etc.
Finite automata (deterministic and non-deterministic), regular languages, context free languages.
Turing machines, decidability, NP-completeness, reductions.

References for this basic material are :

M. Sipser : Introduction to the theory of computation.
T. Cormen, C.E. Leiserson, R.L. Rivest, and C. Stein : Introduction to Algorithms (Second Edition).

Administrative Information

Lectures: Tue-Thu 4:30-6:00, CoC 101

Professor: Subhash Khot - 2144 Klaus, 404-385-6603 khot@cc.gatech.edu Office hours : 2:30-4 pm, Thu.

TA: Ashok Kumar Ponnuswami. Office hours: Tuesday 3-4pm, Office: Klaus 2116

Course Syllabus

The first part of the course will cover basic aspects of complexity theory. This includes complexity classes P, NP, L, NL, PSPACE, Polynomial Hierarchy, BPP, P/poly, NC, IP, AM, #P and relationships among them.

The second part of the course will cover advanced toipcs, e.g. PCPs, circuit lower bounds, communication complexity, derandomization, property testing and quantum computation. The emphasis will be on breadth rather than covering any of these topics in depth. We will introduce a specific topic, give a broad overview of results, and only a glimpse of the techniques. During this part of the course, you would need to read a couple of advanced research papers/surveys and write a report.

Homeworks and Exams

References and Textbooks

We will not "follow" any particular textbook. You may want to refer to :

C.H. Papadimitriou : Computational Complexity.
D.Z. Du and K.I. Ko : Theory of Computational Complexity.

Recommended reference is Sanjeev Arora and Boaz Barak's book-drafrt, available at Sanjeev Arora's webpage.

Course notes from similar courses taught at Princeton and UC-Berkeley would be useful. See :

Georgia Inst. of Technology College of Computing

CS 6520 Computational Complexity Subhash Khot