Lecture Notes in Computer Science

The Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS) is alt- nately held in France and in Germany. The conference of March 25-27, 2004 at the Corum, Montpellier was the twenty-?rst in this series. Previous meetings took place in Paris (1984), Saarbruc ¨ ken (1985), Orsay (1986), Passau (1987), Bordeaux (1988), Paderborn (1989), Rouen (1990), Hamburg (1991), Cachan (1992),Wurzburg ¨ (1993),Caen(1994),Munc ¨ hen(1995),Grenoble(1996),Lub ¨ eck (1997), Paris (1998), Trier (1999), Lille (2000), Dresden (2001), Antibes (2002), and Berlin (2003). The symposium looks back at a remarkable tradition of over 20 years. The interest in STACS has been increasing continuously during recent years and has turned it into one of the most signi?cant conferences in theoretical computer science. The STACS 2004 call for papers led to more than 200 submissions from all over the world. Thereviewingprocesswasextremelyhard:morethan800reviewsweredone. We would like to thank the program committee and all external referees for the valuable work they put into the reviewing process of this conference. We had a two-day meeting for the program committee in Montpellier during November 21-22, 2003. Just 54 papers (i.e., 27% of the submissions) could be accepted, as we wanted to keep the conference in its standard format with only two parallel sessions. This strict selection guaranteed the very high scienti?c quality of the conference.