A BGP-based mechanism for lowest-cost routing
The routing of traffic between Internet domains or Autonomous Systems (ASs), a task known as interdomain routing, is currently handled by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). In this paper, we address the problem of interdomain routing from a mechanism-design point of view. The application of mechanism-design principles to the study of routing is the subject of earlier work by Nisan and Ronen  and Hershberger and Suri . In this paper, we formulate and solve a version of the routing-mechanism design problem that is different from the previously studied version in three ways that make it more accurately reflective of real-world interdomain routing: (1) we treat the nodes as strategic agents, rather than the links; (2) our mechanism computes lowest-cost routes for all source-destination pairs and payments for transit nodes on all of the routes (rather than computing routes and payments for only one source-destination pair at a time, as is done in [14, 10]); (3) we show how to compute our mechanism with a distributed algorithm that is a straightforward extension to BGP and causes only modest increases in routing-table size and convergence time (in contrast with the centralized algorithms used in [14, 10]). This approach of using an existing protocol as a substrate for distributed computation may prove useful in future development of Internet algorithms generally, not only for routing or pricing problems. Our design and analysis of a strategyproof, BGP-based routing mechanism provides a new, promising direction in distributed algorithmic mechanism design, which has heretofore been focused mainly on multicast cost sharing.

title: On the Difficulty of Designing Good Classifiers
abstract: It is a very interesting and well-studied problem, given two point sets W, B\(\subseteq\)ℜn, to design a linear decision tree that classifies them —that is, no leaf subdivision contains points from both B and W — and is as simple as possible, either in terms of the total number of nodes, or in terms of its depth. We show that, unless ZPP=NP, the depth of a classifier cannot be approximated within a factor smaller than 6/5, and that the total number of nodes cannot be approximated within a factor smaller than n1/5. Our proof relies on a simple connection between this problem and graph coloring, and uses recent nonapproximability results for graph coloring. We also study the problem of designing a classifier with a single inequality that involves as few variables as possible, and point out certain aspects of the difficulty of this problem.

title: On a network creation game
abstract: We introduce a novel game that models the creation of Internet-like networks by selfish node-agents without central design or coordination. Nodes pay for the links that they establish, and benefit from short paths to all destinations. We study the Nash equilibria of this game, and prove results suggesting that the "price of anarchy"  in this context (the relative cost of the lack of coordination) may be modest. Several interesting: extensions are suggested.

title: The 1-Steiner Tree Problem
abstract: We present an O ( n 2 ) algorithm for finding the point on the plane which, if added to a given set of n points, will result in the shortest possible spanning tree.

title: Optimization, approximation, and complexity classes
abstract: We define a natural variant of NP, MAX NP, and also a subclass called MAX SNP. These are classes of optimization problems, and in fact contain several natural, well-studied ones. We show that problems in these classes can be approximated with some bounded error. Furthermore, we show that a number of common optimization problems are complete under a kind of careful transformation (called L-reduction) that preserves approximability. It follows that such a complete problem has a polynomial-time approximation scheme iff the whole class does. These results may help explain the lack of progress on the approximability of a host of optimization problems.

title: The serializability of concurrent database updates
abstract: A sequence of interleaved user transactions in a database system may not be ser:ahzable, t e, equivalent to some sequential execution of the individual transactions Using a simple transaction model, it ~s shown that recognizing the transaction histories that are serlahzable is an NP-complete problem. Several efficiently recognizable subclasses of the class of senahzable histories are therefore introduced; most of these subclasses correspond to senahzabdity principles existing in the hterature and used in practice Two new principles that subsume all previously known ones are also proposed Necessary and sufficient conditions are given for a class of histories to be the output of an efficient history scheduler, these conditions imply that there can be no efficient scheduler that outputs all of senahzable histories, and also that all subclasses of senalizable histories studied above have an efficient scheduler Finally, it is shown how these results can be extended to far more general transaction models, to transactions with partly interpreted functions, and to distributed database systems

title: The complexity of recognizing polyhedral scenes
abstract: Given a drawing of straight lines on the plane, we wish to decide whether it is the projection of the visible part of a set of opaque polyhedra. Although there is an extensive literature and reports on empirically succesful algorithm: for this problem, there has been no definite result concerning its complexity. In this paper we show that, rather surprisingly, this problem is NP-complete. This is true even in the relatively simple case of trihedral scenes (no four planes share a point) without shadows or cracks. Despite this negative result, we present a fast algorithm for the important special case of orthohedral scenes (all planes are perpendicular to one of the three axes) with a fixed number of "possible" objects.

title: The complexity of computing a Nash equilibrium
abstract: We resolve the question of the complexity of Nash equilibrium by showing that the problem of computing a Nash equilibrium in a game with 4 or more players is complete for the complexity class PPAD. Our proof uses ideas from the recently-established equivalence between polynomial time solvability of normal form games and graphical games, establishing that these kinds of games can simulate a PPAD-complete class of Brouwer functions.

title: On the approximability of trade-offs and optimal access of Web sources
abstract: We study problems in multiobjective optimization, in which solutions to a combinatorial optimization problem are evaluated with respect to several cost criteria, and we are interested in the trade-off between these objectives (the so-called Pareto curve). We point out that, under very general conditions, there is a polynomially succinct curve that /spl epsiv/-approximates the Pareto curve, for any /spl epsiv/>0. We give a necessary and sufficient condition under which this approximate Pareto curve can be constructed in time polynomial in the size of the instance and 1//spl epsiv/. In the case of multiple linear objectives, we distinguish between two cases: when the underlying feasible region is convex, then we show that approximating the multi-objective problem is equivalent to approximating the single-objective problem. If however the feasible region is discrete, then we point out that the question reduces to an old and recurrent one: how does the complexity of a combinatorial optimization problem change when its feasible region is intersected with a hyperplane with small coefficients; we report some interesting new findings in this domain. Finally, we apply these concepts and techniques to formulate and solve approximately a cost-time-quality trade-off for optimizing access to the World-Wide Web, in a model first studied by Etzioni et al. (1996) (which was actually the original motivation for this work).

title: Optimum Grip of a Polygon
abstract: It has been shown by Baker, Fortune and Grosse that any two-dimensional polygonal object can be prehended stably with three fingers, so that its weight (along the third dimension) is balanced. Besides, in this paper we show that form closure of a polygon object can be achieved by four fingers (previous proofs were not complete). We formulate and solve the problem of finding the optimum stable grip or form closure of any given polygon. For stable grip it is most natural to minimize the forces needed to balance through friction the object''s weight along the third dimension. For form closure, we minimize the worst-case forces needed to balance any unit force acting on the center of gravity of the object. The mathematical techniques used in the two instances are an interesting mix of Optimization and Euclidean geometry. Our results lead to algorithms for the efficient computation of the optimum grip in each case.

title: Topological Queries