Randomization in Parallel Stringology

In this abstract, we provide an overview of our survey of randomized techniques for exploiting the parallelism in string matching problems. Broadly, the study of string matching falls into two categories: standard stringology and nonstandard stringology. Standard Stringology concerns the study of various exact matching problems. The fundamental problem here is the basic string matching problem where given a pattern string p 2 m and a text string t 2 n, the problem is to nd all occurrences i in t where the pattern occurs, that is, t[i i+m 1] = p[1 m]. Other well-studied problems within standard stringology include multiple pattern matching, dictionary matching, text indexing, etc. Non-standard Stringology concerns the study of various inexact matching problems. A fundamental problem here is string matching with wildcards where the problem, as before, is to nd all occurrences of the pattern within the text; however, some positions in the text and the pattern are marked as \wildcards"(denoted ), that is, these positions match whatever be the symbol in the string they align against. Formally, given p occurs in t at i if for all 1 j m, t[i+j 1] = p[j] if p[j] 6= and t[i+j 1] 6= . Another important problem here is the k-mismatches problem in which the goal is to determine all those positions in the text where the pattern occurs with at most k mismatches amongst the aligned symbols. Other problems here include subset matching, range matching etc. Stringology includes study of many other problems involving