Best paper award

Congratulations to Peyman Afshani who received the ESA best paper award for Fragile Complexity of Comparison-Based Algorithms at the ALGO 2019 in Munich. In the paper, Afshani et al. initiate a study of algorithms with a focus on the computational complexity of individual elements, and introduce the fragile complexity of comparison-based algorithms as the maximal number of comparisons any individual element takes part in.

Peyman Afshani, Ass. Professor at Aarhus University

The authors give a number of upper and lower bounds on the fragile complexity for fundamental problems, including Minimum, Selection, Sorting and Heap Construction. The results include both deterministic and randomized upper and lower bounds, and demonstrate a separation between the two settings for a number of problems. The depth of a comparator network is a straight-forward upper bound on the worst case fragile complexity of the corresponding fragile algorithm. Moreover, it is proven that fragile complexity is a different and strictly easier property than the depth of comparator networks, in the sense that for some problems a fragile complexity equal to the best network depth can be achieved with less total work and that with randomization, even a lower fragile complexity is possible.

Read the paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.02857