This book suggests that religion, in its usual sense, can be replaced by something better, that the human spirit or subjectivity can be the subject of scientific study and that lack of purpose or design in the universe is not a handicap but a positive opportunity for intelligent beings to make of the universe and its contents what they reasonably can. The book breaks new ground in suggesting a radical alternative to religion. It offers a scientific and humanist alternative to religion which appeals to people's critical faculties rather than emotions or intuitions. It also challenges current views of causation and the principle of sufficient reason by stressing the subjectivity of our reasoning powers and clarifying these in relation to an independent external reality. It develops and elaborates a notion of the 'noosphere' within a theoretical system, this enables the notion to assume a scientific importance which it currently lacks because it is treated as an isolated, eccentric and rather mystical idea.

This volume contains the papers presented at the3rd International Wo- shoponRandomizationandApproximationTechniquesinComputer Science (RANDOM 99) and the 2nd International Workshop on - proximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (APPROX 99), which took place concurrently at the University of California, Berkeley, from August 8 11, 1999. RANDOM 99 is concerned with appli- tions of randomness to computational and combinatorial problems, and is the third workshop in the series following Bologna (1997) and Barcelona (1998). APPROX 99 focuses on algorithmic and complexity issues surrounding the - velopment of e?cient approximate solutions to computationally hard problems, and is the second in the series after Aalborg (1998). The volume contains 24 contributed papers, selected by the two program committees from 44 submissions received in response to the call for papers, together with abstracts of invited lectures by Uri Feige (Weizmann Institute), Christos Papadimitriou (UC Berkeley), Madhu Sudan (MIT), and Avi Wigd- son (Hebrew University and IAS Princeton). We would like to thank all of the authors who submitted papers, our invited speakers, the external referees we consulted and the members of the program committees, who were: RANDOM 99 APPROX 99 Alistair Sinclair, UC Berkeley Dorit Hochbaum, UC Berkeley Noga Alon, Tel Aviv U. Sanjeev Arora, Princeton U. Jennifer Chayes, Microsoft Leslie Hall, Johns Hopkins U. Monika Henzinger, Compaq-SRC Samir Khuller, U. of Maryland Mark Jerrum, U. of Edinburgh Phil Klein, Brown U."