Randomized Rounding without Solving the Linear Program 33

We introduce a new technique called oblivious rounding | a variant of randomized rounding that avoids the bottleneck of rst solving the linear program. Avoiding this bottleneck yields more eecient algorithms and brings probabilistic methods to bear on a new class of problems. We give oblivious rounding algorithms that approximately solve general packing and covering problems, including a parallel algorithm to nd sparse strategies for matrix games.