Valiant has proposed a new theory of algorithmic
computation based on perfect matchings and the Pfaffian.
We study the properties of {\it matchgates}---the basic
building blocks in this new theory. We give a set of
algebraic identities
which completely characterize these objects in terms of
the ... more >>>

A family ${\cal F}$ of min-wise independent permutations is known to be a useful tool of indexing replicated documents on the Web. For any integer $n>0$, let $S_{n}$ be the family of al permutations on $[1,n]=\{1,2,\ldots, n\}$.
For any integer $k \in [1,n]$ and any real $\varepsilon >0$, we ... more >>>

The $H$-matching problem asks to partition the vertices of an input graph $G$
into sets of size $k=|V(H)|$, each of which induces a subgraph of $G$
isomorphic to $H$. The $H$-matching problem has been classified as polynomial
or NP-complete depending on whether $k\leq 2$ or not. We consider a variant
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