We show that for several natural classes of ``structured'' matrices, including symmetric, circulant, Hankel and Toeplitz matrices, approximating the permanent modulo a prime $p$ is as hard as computing the exact value. Results of this kind are well known for the class of arbitrary matrices; however the techniques used do ... more >>>

We prove that MAX-3SAT can be approximated in polynomial time
within a factor 9/8 on random instances.

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We describe a deterministic algorithm that, for constant k,
given a k-DNF or k-CNF formula f and a parameter e, runs in time
linear in the size of f and polynomial in 1/e and returns an
estimate of the fraction of satisfying assignments for f up to ... more >>>