Efficiency is Easy to Hack

Is it easy to stop RNA polymerase?

Among transcription factors that bind to bacterial RNA polymerase (RNAP) and modulate its activity, a number of small molecules irreversibly inhibit RNAP thereby causing cell death. To be of clinical significance such inhibitors must (1) inhibit a broad range of bacterial RNAPs but not affect human cells, (2) penetrate bacterial cell walls and (3) circumvent bacterial resistance mechanisms. Rif...

Defining Privacy Is Supposed to Be Easy

Formally specifying privacy goals is not trivial. The most widely used approach in formal methods is based on the static equivalence of frames in the applied pi-calculus, basically asking whether or not the intruder is able to distinguish two given worlds. A subtle question is how we can be sure that we have specified all pairs of worlds to properly reflect our intuitive privacy goal. To addres...

Why is English so easy to segment?

Cross-linguistic studies on unsupervised word segmentation have consistently shown that English is easier to segment than other languages. In this paper, we propose an explanation of this finding based on the notion of segmentation ambiguity. We show that English has a very low segmentation ambiguity compared to Japanese and that this difference correlates with the segmentation performance in a...

Is code equivalence easy to decide?

We study the computational difficulty of deciding whether two matrices generate equivalent linear codes, i.e., codes that consist of the same codewords up to a fixed permutation on the codeword coordinates. We call this problem Code Equivalence. Using techniques from the area of interactive proofs, we show on the one hand, that under the assumption that the polynomial-time hierarchy does not co...

Is Code Equivalence Easy to Decide?