What we do and why

The Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (ECCC) was established in 1994 as a forum for the rapid and widespread interchange of ideas, techniques, and research in computational complexity. Posting on the ECCC has the status of a technical report. The Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity 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.
• complexity bounds and trade-offs (with the emphasis on lower bounds).
• complexity theoretic aspects of specific areas including coding theory, combinatorics, cryptography, game theory, logic, machine learning, optimization, property testing, and quantum computation.

For more details see the Call for Papers.

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, 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 ECCC has just relocated at the Weizmann Institute of Science. The previous locations were first at the University of Trier (1994-2004), and then at the Hasso Plattner Institute (2004-2016).

Our new URL is eccc.weizmann.ac.il, and the previous URL (eccc.hpi-web.de) is supposed to redirect to the new location. All hyperlinks to reports are still functional after the transition.

Our first priority at the next couple of weeks is to verify that the transition has been performed smoothly and that all existing features work as they used to. (Later on and as circumstances permit, we shall perform various minor improvements, which were on our TODO list for a while.)

Please inform Amir Gonen (amir.gonen@weizmann.ac.il), while CCing Oded Goldreich (oded.goldreich@weizmann.ac.il), as soon as you discover anything that does not function as it used to.

At this point, I would like to thank Christoph Meinel, who has been one of the founders of ECCC and served as its chief editor and head of its local office for 23 years. Special thanks also to Christian Willems, who has provided the technical support for the operation of ECCC for the last few years and has supervised the current transition from the sending side. (I am aware that others deserves much credits as well, but regret that I cannot provide the relevant details at this time. Providing a full account of the history of the establishing of ECCC and its operation since 1994, in the form of a "History of ECCC" page, is on our TODO list.)

Lastly, many thanks to Amir Gonen for performing the transition on the receiving side and for agreeing to undertake the operation from this point on.

Oded Goldreich

After 23 years of running the ECCC, first at the University of Trier, then at the Hasso Plattner Institute, the ECCC will find a new home at the Weizmann Institute.

This smooth transition will happen with the beginning of 2017. We will keep you informed upfront.

209 reports have been published on ECCC in 2015. The collection of all these reports is now available on DVD. You can order the archive (and also the archive DVDs from earlier years) at the local office. Please email eccc@eccc.hpi-web.de for ordering.

The best known circuit lower bounds against unrestricted circuits remained around $3n$ for several decades. Moreover, the only known technique for proving lower bounds in this model, gate elimination, is inherently limited to proving lower bounds of less than $5n$. In this work, we suggest a first non-gate-elimination approach for ... more >>>

A homogeneous depth three circuit $C$ computes a polynomial
$$f = T_1 + T_2 + ... + T_s ,$$ where each $T_i$ is a product of $d$ linear forms in $n$ variables over some underlying field $\mathbb{F}$. Given black-box access to $f$, can we efficiently reconstruct (i.e. proper learn) a ... more >>>

There are two natural complexity measures associated with DNFs: their size, which is the number of clauses; and their width, which is the maximal number of variables in a clause. It is a folklore result that DNFs of small size can be approximated by DNFs of small width (logarithmic in ... more >>>