The papers in this volume were presented at the Thirty-Sixth Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2004), held in Chicago, Illinois, June 13-15, 2004. The Symposium was sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT).In response to a Call For Papers, posted at a University of Chicago website, 271 submissions were received by the submission deadline of November 5, 4:59pm EST. All were submitted electronically on the Microsoft Conference Management Toolkit (CMT) website.The Program Committee began its deliberations electronically on December 10, and continued in that medium until its meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, on January 9 and 10. Electronic discussion of unresolved issues continued for some weeks after the meeting.The CMT website was used for paper submission and initial posting of reviews and comments; most of the discussion was conducted and coordinated on a University of Chicago website using software produced by Daniel Tefankovic and tailored to the needs of the PC.The Program Committee selected 71 papers for presentation; one was later withdrawn.The submissions were not refereed, and many of these papers represented reports of continuing research. It is expected that most of them will appear in a more polished and complete form in scientific journals.The papers encompass a wide variety of areas of theoretical computer science, ranging from classical problems in algorithms and complexity theory (including lower bounds, graph algorithms, network flows, cryptography, random structures, inapproximabilty/PCPs), to heavily represented emerging areas and models such as quantum computing and algorithmic game theory. A number of additional areas of traditional or more recent interest to the SIGACT community are represented by one or two papers each; these include: distributed computing, computational geometry/topology, mathematical algorithms, metric spaces/embeddings, data mining, analysis of data streams, property testing.In addition tothe contributed talks, the program included three invited plenary talks, represented by brief abstracts in this volume: Quantum Algorithms a Decade After Shor, by Andris Ambainis (see page 111); Network Games, by Eva Tardos (see page 341); and Depth Through Breadth, or Why Should We Attend Talks In Other Areas?, by Avi Wigderson (see page 579).The Program Committee would like to thank all authors who submitted papers for consideration. The PC also wishes to thank the large number of members of the community who assisted the PC in assessing the merits of the submissions (see "Reviewers," page xii).The PC is grateful to Microsoft Research and to the CMT Web Support staff for providing the web-site and assisting with its use.
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