Inheritance powder is the name that was given to poisons, especially arsenic, that were commonly used in the 17th and early 18th centuries to hasten the death of the elderly. For most of the 17th century, arsenic was deadly but undetectable, making it nearly impossible to prove that someone had been poisoned. The first arsenic test produced a gas—hardly something that a scientist could show to ...

This document describes an implementation of a Column Generation algorithm using GAMS. The well-known cutting stock problem is used as an example.

A compendium of thirty previously published open problems in computational geometry is presented. [SIGACT News, 32(3) Issue, 120 Sep. 2001, 63–72.] The computational geometry community has made many advances in the relatively short (quarter-century) of the field’s existence. Along the way researchers have engaged with a number of problems that have resisted solution. We gather here a list of op...

Reverse Engineering is the traditional bread-and-butter of digital forensics research. Companies like Microsoft and Apple deliver computational artifacts (operating systems, applications and phones) to the commercial market. These artifacts are bought and used by billions. Some have evil intent, and (if society is lucky), the computers end up in the hands of law enforcement. Unfortunately the o...

Introduction Conclusions References

The log-rank conjecture is one of the fundamental open problems in communication complexity. It speculates that the deterministic communication complexity of any two-party function is equal to the log of the rank of its associated matrix, up to polynomial factors. Despite much research, we still know very little about this conjecture. Recently, there has been renewed interest in this conjecture...

Here is a real gift to the field from David Johnson: After a thirteen year intermission, David is restarting his NP-completeness column. His column will now appear about twice yearly in ACM Transactions on Algorithms. Welcome back David, and thanks! And for those for whom a diet of two per year won’t do, meals past can be found at http://www.research.att.com/ ̃dsj/columns.html. As to the Complex...

We introduce a new concept in column generation for handling complex large scale optimization problems, called two-stage column generation, where columns for the compact and extensive formulation are simultaneously generated. The new framework is specifically conceived for tackling complex problems that cannot be efficiently solved by standard column generation and exploits the relationship bet...