Data Structures and Efficient Algorithms

Prof. Dr. Thomas Ottmann, Institut für Informatik, Universität Freiburg.

Algorithms are a central concept in computer science. TheGerman Science Foundation (DFG) started a special jointinitiative on data structures and efficient algorithms in1986 with the aim of encouraging collaborative research onalgorithms. For a period of five years about a dozenprojects were funded with an emphasis on algorithms and datastructures for geometric problems, on the one hand, andparallel and distributed algorithms, on the other.This volume contains 18 papers that are intended to give animpression of the achievements of this joint researchinitiative. The first group of papers addresses research onfundamental data structures, computational geometry, graphalgorithms, computer graphics, and spatial databases. Thesecond group of papers centers on the following problems:the design of parallel architectures and routing strategies,simulation of parallel machines, and the design ofdistributed algorithms for solving difficult problems.

Resemblance and symmetries of geometric patterns.- Selected topics from computational geometry, data structures and motion planning.- Processing of hierarchically defined graphs and graph families.- The combination of spatial access methods and computational geometry in geographic database systems.- A flexible and extensible index manager for spatial database systems.- The performance of object decomposition techniques for spatial query processing.- Distributed image synthesis with breadth-first ray tracing and the ray-z-buffer.- Restricted orientation computational geometry.- Monotonous Bisector* Trees - a tool for efficient partitioning of complex scenes of geometric objects.- Learning convex sets under uniform distribution.- Spatial access structures for geometric databases.- On spanning trees with low crossing numbers.- High performance universal hashing, with applications to shared memory simulations.- Distributed game tree search on a massively parallel system.- Balanced strategies for routing on meshes.- Complexity of Boolean functions on PRAMs - Lower bound techniques.- Enumerative vs. genetic optimization two parallel algorithms for the bin packing problem.- Area efficient methods to increase the reliability of circuits.