This special issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science is devoted to the fourteenth Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science (ICTCS) held at University of Palermo, Italy, from 9th to 11th September 2013. ICTCS is the conference of the Italian Chapter of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science and covers a wide spectrum of topics in Theoretical Computer Science, ranging from computational complexity to logic, from algorithms and data structure to programming languages, from combinatorics on words to distributed computing. For this reason, the contributions here included come from very different areas of Theoretical Computer Science. In fact this special issue is motivated by the desire to give people who have presented their ideas at the 14th ICTCS the opportunity to publish papers on their work. Submitted papers have been subject to a careful and severe reviewing process and 11 of them were selected for this special issue.

We extend the simply-typed lambda-calculus with a mechanism for dynamic and incremental rebinding of code. Fragments of open code which can be dynamically rebound are values. Differently from standard static binding, which is done on a positional basis, rebinding is done on a nominal basis, that is, free variables in open code are associated with names which do not obey α-equivalence. Moreover, rebinding is incremental, that is, just a subset of names can be rebound, making possible code specialization, and rebinding can even introduce new names. Finally, rebindings, which are associations between names and terms, are first-class values, and can be manipulated by operators such as overriding and renaming. We define a type system in which the type for a rebinding, in addition to specify an association between names and types (similarly to record types), is also annotated. The annotation says whether or not the domain of the rebinding having this type may contain more names than the ones that are specified in the type. We show soundness of the type system.

A set X ⊆ Σ** of pictures is a code if every picture over Σ is tilable in at most one way with pictures in X. The definition of strong prefix code is introduced. The family of finite strong prefix codes is decidable and it has a polynomial time decoding algorithm. Maximality for finite strong prefix codes is also studied and related to the notion of completeness. We prove that any finite strong prefix code can be embedded in a unique maximal strong prefix code that has minimal size and cardinality. A complete characterization of the structure of maximal finite strong prefix codes completes the paper.

Circular string matching is a problem which naturally arises in many contexts. It consists in finding all occurrences of the rotations of a pattern of length m in a text of length n. There exist optimal worst- and average-case algorithms for circular string matching. Here, we present a suboptimal average-case algorithm for circular string matching requiring time $\mathcal{O}$(n) and space $\mathcal{O}$(m). The importance of our contribution is underlined by the fact that the proposed algorithm can be easily adapted to deal with circular dictionary matching. In particular, we show how the circular dictionary-matching problem can be solved in average-case time $\mathcal{O}$(n + M) and space $\mathcal{O}$(M), where M is the total length of the dictionary patterns, assuming that the shortest pattern is sufficiently long. Moreover, the presented average-case algorithms and other worst-case approaches were also implemented. Experimental results, using real and synthetic data, demonstrate that the implementation of the presented algorithms can accelerate the computations by more than a factor of two compared to the corresponding implementation of other approaches.

This article introduces an analogue of permutation classes in the context of polyominoes. For both permutation classes and polyomino classes, we present an original way of characterizing them by avoidance constraints (namely, with excluded submatrices) and we discuss how canonical such a description by submatrix-avoidance can be. We provide numerous examples of permutation and polyomino classes which may be defined and studied from the submatrix-avoidance point of view, and conclude with various directions for future research on this topic.

A cross-bifix-free set of words is a set in which no prefix of any length of any word is the suffix of any other word in the set. A construction of cross-bifix-free sets has recently been proposed in Chee et al. (2013) within a constant factor of optimality. We propose a Gray code for these cross-bifix-free sets and a CAT algorithm generating it. Our Gray code list is trace partitioned, that is, words with zero in the same positions are consecutive in the list.

We investigate the issues of existence and efficiency of lookahead equilibria in congestion games. Lookahead equilibria, whose study has been initiated by Mirrokni et al. (2012), correspond to the natural extension of pure Nash equilibria in which the players, when making use of global information in order to predict subsequent reactions of the other ones, have computationally limited capabilities.

In this paper, we study weighted trust-networks (but also unweighted), where each edge is associated with either a positive or a negative score. Hence, we consider a distrust relationship as well, allowing a user to rate poor experiences with other individuals in his web of acquaintances. We propose an algorithm to compose two of such networks in a single one, in order to merge the knowledge obtained in two different communities of individuals (possibly partially-overlapping), through two different trust management-systems. Our algorithm is based on semiring algebraic-structures, in order to have a parametric computational-framework. Such composition can be adopted whenever two trust-based communities (with the same scope) need to be amalgamated: for instance, two competitor-companies that need to unify the trust-based knowledge on their (sub-) suppliers.

We consider the following multi-level opinion spreading model on networks. Initially, each node gets a weight, from the set {0,. . .,k – 1}, which measures the individual conviction of a new idea or product. Then, by proceeding in rounds, each node updates its weight according to those of its neighbours. We study k-dynamos that are initial assignments of weights leading each node to get the value k – 1 – e.g. unanimous maximum level of acceptance – within a given number of rounds; the goal is to minimize the sum of the initial weights of the nodes. We determine lower bounds on the sum of the initial weights under the irreversible simple majority rules, where a node increases its weight if and only if the majority of its neighbours have a weight that is higher than its own. We study the relations among 2-dynamos and k-dynamos, with and without a bound on the number of rounds needed to reach the desired all-(k – 1) configuration. Moreover, we provide constructive tight upper bounds for some classes of regular topologies: rings, tori and cliques.

For some text algorithms, the real measure for the complexity analysis is not the string itself but its structure stored in its prefix table or equivalently border table. In this paper, we define the combinatorial class of prefix lists, namely a sequence of integers together with their size, and an injection ψ from the class of prefix tables to the class of prefix lists. We call a valid prefix list the image by ψ of a prefix table. In particular, we describe algorithms converting a prefix/border table to a prefix list and inverse linear algorithms from computing from a prefix list L = ψ(P) two words respectively in a minimal size alphabet and on a maximal size alphabet with P as prefix table. We then give a new upper bound on the number of prefix tables for strings of length n (on any alphabet) which is of order (1 + ϕ)n (with $\varphi=\frac{1+\sqrt{5}}{2}$ the golden mean) and also present a corresponding lower bound.

Given a set $\mathcal{D}$ of q documents, the Longest Common Substring (LCS) problem asks, for any integer 2 ⩽ k ⩽ q, the longest substring that appears in k documents. LCS is a well-studied problem having a wide range of applications in Bioinformatics: from microarrays to DNA sequences alignments and analysis. This problem has been solved by Hui (2000International Journal of Computer Science and Engineering15 73–76) by using a famous constant-time solution to the Lowest Common Ancestor (LCA) problem in trees coupled with the use of suffix trees.

In this article, we present a simple method for solving the LCS problem by using suffix trees (STs) and classical union-find data structures. In turn, we show how this simple algorithm can be adapted in order to work with other space efficient data structures such as the enhanced suffix arrays (ESA) and the compressed suffix tree.

This paper considers ∃*∀* prenex sentences of pure first-order predicate calculus with equality. This is the set of formulas which Ramsey's treated in a famous article of 1930. We demonstrate that the satisfiability problem and the problem of existence of arbitrarily large models for these formulas can be reduced to the satisfiability problem for ∃*∀* prenex sentences of Set Theory (in the relators ∈, =).

We present two satisfiability-preserving (in a broad sense) translations Φ ↦ $\dot{\Phi}$ and Φ ↦ Φσ of ∃*∀* sentences from pure logic to well-founded Set Theory, so that if $\dot{\Phi}$ is satisfiable (in the domain of Set Theory) then so is Φ, and if Φσ is satisfiable (again, in the domain of Set Theory) then Φ can be satisfied in arbitrarily large finite structures of pure logic.

It turns out that |$\dot{\Phi}$| = $\mathcal{O}$(|Φ|) and |Φσ| = $\mathcal{O}$(|Φ|2).

Our main result makes use of the fact that ∃*∀* sentences, even though constituting a decidable fragment of Set Theory, offer ways to describe infinite sets. Such a possibility is exploited to glue together infinitely many models of increasing cardinalities of a given ∃*∀* logical formula, within a single pair of infinite sets.