Who am I?
I got interested in PCP when I was a Master student in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. My Master's thesis was about using heuristic search to solve hard PCP instances.

Why am I so interested in PCP?
It is a classic problem with elegant properties. There are few descriptions about the PCP solver. Though we can not solve all instances, it is still interesting to solve some of them. If we can link it to the real applications, that will be really nice. I came to know this problem in the Heuristic Search course, and did the project on this problem. It also helped me to determine my research area and supervisors, and helped me earn a Master degree.

How to contact me?
Any suggestions, comments, criticisms are welcome. Please send email to zhao at cs.ualberta.ca.






















This webpage was created on April 29, 2001
Last modified on March 19, 2003 by Ling Zhao

   

Introduction
What's PCP?
PCP's theoretical place

Solving hard PCP instances
Masks
Bidirectional probing
Heuristic pruning
Cache scheme
Depth-first iterative deepening
Tail recursion removal

Instances having no solutions
Filters
Masks
Exclusion method
Pattern method

Hard instances list
The known hard instances
Data of the solutions

Documents
Presentation slides
PCP Instances
Links

Next step
Instances unsolved
Pattern method implementation
Where are the applications?
Some conjectures

Contact
Who am I?
Why am I so interested?
How to contact?