Recently, a variety ofresults on the complexitystatusofthegraph
isomorphism problem has been obtained. These results belong to the
so-called structural part of Complexity Theory. Our idea behind this
book is to summarize such results which might otherwise not be easily
accessible in the literature, and also, to give the reader an
understanding of the aims and topics in Structural Complexity Theory, in
general. The text is basically self contained; the only prerequisite for
reading it is some elementary knowledge from Complexity Theory and
Probability Theory. It can be used to teach a seminar or a monographic
graduate course, but also parts of it (especially Chapter 1) provide a
source of examples for a standard graduate course on Complexity Theory.
Many people have helped us in different ways III the process of writing
this book. Especially, we would like to thank V. Arvind, R.V. Book, E.
May- ordomo, and the referee who gave very constructive comments. This
book project was especially made possible by a DAAD grant in the
"Acciones In- tegrada" program. The third author has been supported by
the ESPRIT project ALCOM-II.