Issues of matching and searching on elementary discrete structures arise pervasively in computer science and many of its applications, and their relevance is expected to grow as information is amassed and shared at an accelerating pace. Several algorithms were discovered as a result of these needs, which in turn created the subfield of Pattern Matching. This book provides an overview of the current state of Pattern Matching as seen by specialists who have devoted years of study to the field. It covers most of the basic principles and presents material advanced enough to faithfully portray the current frontier of research. As a result of these recent advances, this is the right time for a book that brings together information relevant to both graduate students and specialists in need of an in-depth reference.

Combinatorial Algorithms on Words refers to the collection of manipulations of strings of symbols (words) - not necessarily from a finite alphabet - that exploit the combinatorial properties of the logical/physical input arrangement to achieve efficient computational performances. The model of computation may be any of the established serial paradigms (e.g. RAM's, Turing Machines), or one of the emerging parallel models (e.g. PRAM, WRAM, Systolic Arrays, CCC). This book focuses on some of the accomplishments of recent years in such disparate areas as pattern matching, data compression, free groups, coding theory, parallel and VLSI computation, and symbolic dynamics; these share a common flavor, yet ltave not been examined together in the past. In addition to being theoretically interest ing, these studies have had significant applications. It happens that these works have all too frequently been carried out in isolation, with contributions addressing similar issues scattered throughout a rather diverse body of literature. We felt that it would be advantageous to both current and future researchers to collect this work in a sin gle reference. It should be clear that the book's emphasis is on aspects of combinatorics and com plexity rather than logic, foundations, and decidability. In view of the large body of research and the degree of unity already achieved by studies in the theory of auto mata and formal languages, we have allocated very little space to them."

This volume presents the proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM '95, held in Espoo, Finland in July 1995.
CPM addresses issues of searching and matching strings and more complicated patterns such as trees, regular expressions, extended expressions, etc. The aim is to derive non-trivial combinatorial properties in order to improve the performance of the corresponding computational problems. This volume presents 27 selected refereed full research papers and two invited papers; it addresses all current aspects of CPM and its applications such as the design and analysis of algorithms for pattern matching problems in strings, graphs, and hypertexts, as well as in biological sequences and molecules.

The papers contained in this volume were presented at the Fourth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, held in Padova, Italy, in June 1993. Combinatorial pattern matching addresses issues of searching and matching of strings and more complicated patterns such as trees, regular expressions, extended expressions, etc. The goal is to derive nontrivial combinatorial properties for such structures and then to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding computational problems. In recent years, a steady flow of high-quality scientific studies of this subject has changed a sparse set of isolated results into a full-fledged area of algorithmics. The area is expected to grow even further due to the increasing demand for speedand efficiency that comes especially from molecular biology and the Genome project, but also from other diverse areas such as information retrieval, pattern recognition, compilers, data compression, and program analysis.

This volume contains the 22 papers accepted for presentation at the Third Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching held April 29 to May 1, 1992, in Tucson, Arizona; it constitutes the first conference proceedings entirely devoted to combinatorial pattern matching (CPM). CPM deals withissues of searching and matching of strings and other more complicated patterns such as trees, regular expressions, extended expressions, etc. in order to derive combinatorial properties for such structures. As an interdisciplinary field of growing interest, CPM is related to research in information retrieval, pattern recognition, compilers, data compression, and program analysis as well as to results, problems and methods from combinatorial mathematics and molecular biology.

ISTCS '92, the Israel Symposium on the Theory of Computing and Systems, cameabout spontaneously as a result of informal interaction between a group of people who viewed the conference as an appropriate expression of Israeli strength in theoretical aspects of computing and systems. The enthusiasm that the symposium created resulted in the submission of a large number of extremely high quality papers, which led in turn to strict acceptance criteria. This volume contains nineteen selected papers representing the cream of Israeli talent in the field, on a variety of active and interesting topics in the theory of computing and systems.