Many aspects of the internal and external workings of computers can be viewed as a series of communication processes. Communication complexity is the mathematical theory of such communication processes. It is also often used as an abstract model of other aspects of computation. This book surveys this mathematical theory, concentrating on the question of how much communication is necessary for any particular process. The first part of the book is devoted to the simple two-party model introduced by Yao in 1979, which is still the most widely studied model. The second part treats newer models developed to deal with more complicated communication processes. Finally, applications of these models, including computer networks, VLSI circuits, and data structures, are treated in the third part of the book. This is an essential resource for graduate students and researchers in theoretical computer science, circuits, networks and information theory.

This book's introduction features a humorous story of a man with a line of people behind him, who explains to his boss, "I can't find an efficient algorithm, but neither can all these famous people." This man illustrates an important quality of a class of problems, namely, the NP-complete problems: if you can prove that a problem is in this class, then it has no known polynomial-time solution that is guaranteed to work in general. This quality implies that the problem is difficult to deal with in practice. The focus of this book is to teach the reader how to identify, deal with, and understand the essence of NP-complete problems; Computers and Intractability does all of those things effectively. In a readable yet mathematically rigorous manner, the book covers topics such as how to prove that a given problem is NP-complete and how to cope with NP-complete problems. (There is even a chapter on advanced topics, with numerous references.) Computers and Intractability also contains a list of more than 300 problems--most of which are known to be NP-complete--with comments and references.