Information, Physics, and Computation

Abstract

This book presents a unified approach to a rich and rapidly evolving research domain at the interface between statistical physics, theoretical computer science/discrete mathematics, and coding/information theory. The topics which have been selected, including spin glasses, error correcting codes, satisfiability, are central to each field. The approach focuses on the limit of large random instances, adopting a common formulation in terms of graphical models. It presents message passing algorithms like belief propagation and survey propagation, and their use in decoding and constraint satisfaction solving. It also explains analysis techniques like density evolution and the cavity method, and uses them to derive phase diagrams and study phase transitions.