A large body of work studies the complexity of selecting the
$j$-th largest element in an arbitrary set of $n$ elements (a.k.a.
the select$(j)$ operation). In this work, we study the
complexity of select in data that is partially structured by
an initial preprocessing stage and in a data structure ... more >>>

We reduce the approximation factor for Vertex Cover to $2-\Theta(1/\sqrt{logn})$
(instead of the previous $2-\Theta(loglogn/logn})$, obtained by Bar-Yehuda and Even,
and by Monien and Speckenmeyer in 1985. The improvement of the vanishing
factor comes as an application of the recent results of Arora, Rao, and Vazirani
that improved ... more >>>

We show new lower bounds and impossibility results for general (possibly <i>non-black-box</i>) zero-knowledge proofs and arguments. Our main results are that, under reasonable complexity assumptions:
<ol>
<li> There does not exist a two-round zero-knowledge <i>proof</i> system with perfect completeness for an NP-complete language. The previous impossibility result for two-round zero ... more >>>