What we do and why

The Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity is a new forum for the rapid and widespread interchange of ideas, techniques, and research in computational complexity. The purpose of this Colloquium is to use electronic media for scientific communication and discussions in the computational complexity community. The Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (ECCC) welcomes papers, short notes and surveys with

• relevance to the theory of computation,
• clear mathematical profile and
• strictly mathematical format.

Central topics

• models of computation and their complexity,
• trade-off results,
• complexity bounds (with the emphasis on lower bounds).
  Specific areas including complexity issues are
  • combinatorics,
  • communication complexity,
  • cryptography,
  • combinatorial optimization,
  • complexity of learning algorithms,
  • logic.

More reading

Here are some papers on the idea and concept of electronic colloquia and ECCC.

• Christoph Meinel, Volker Klotz
  "The first 10 years of the ECCC digital library"
  Communications of the ACM - CACM, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 131-134, 2006.
• Jochen Bern, Christoph Meinel, Harald Sack
  "Electronic colloquia: idea and practice"
  ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communication - SIGDOC, pp. 113-119, 1998.
• Jochen Bern, Carsten Damm, Christoph Meinel "The Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (ECCC): A Digital Library in Use"
  European Conference on Digital Libraries - ECDL, pp. 405-421, 1997.

The collection of all reports published on ECCC in 2010 is now available on DVD. You can order the archive (and also the archive DVDs from earlier years) at the local office.
Please email to eccc@eccc.hpi-web.de for ordering.

With the extension of our scientific board and the implementation of the improved screening mechanism incorporating topics of interest already in the submission process, the ECCC can now provide a clarified Call for Papers.
Please keep in mind, that the ECCC focusses on complexity issues rather than on general algorithmic topics. If you plan to submit, please verify that your work matches the scope of interest defined in the CfP.

We recently modified the ECCC screening mechanism to meet the demand of fast response times of the scientific board. We ask all authors to choose the primary and secondary topics of their papers carefully as we're using this information to decide which editor should review your paper.

We give an example of a non-commutative monotone polynomial f which can be computed by a polynomial-size non-commutative formula, but every monotone non-commutative circuit computing f must have an exponential size. In the non-commutative setting this gives, a fortiori, an exponential separation between monotone and general formulas, monotone and general ... more >>>

Given a DNF formula $f$ on $n$ variables, the two natural size measures are the number of terms or size $s(f)$, and the maximum width of a term $w(f)$. It is folklore that short DNF formulas can be made narrow. We prove a converse, showing that narrow formulas can be ... more >>>

We explore the relationships between circuit complexity, the complexity of generating circuits, and circuit-analysis algorithms. Our results can be roughly divided into three parts:

1. Lower Bounds Against Medium-Uniform Circuits. Informally, a circuit class is ``medium uniform'' if it can be generated by an algorithmic process that is somewhat complex ... more >>>