We consider a fixpoint expressions μy.νx. f (x,y) over the lattice {0,1}n, where f : {0,1}2n → {0,1}n is any monotone function. We study only algorithms for calculating these expressions using f only as a black-box: they may only ask for the value of f for given arguments. We show that any such algorithm has to do at least about n2 queries to the function f , namely Ω ( n2 logn ) queries.

One of the less studied aspects in human voice processing is how the transition articulations between phonemes occur in fluent speech. Often, lack of information pushes us to deal with them using black-box approach. This is especially true in the field of voice synthesis. In this article the transitions from nasal consonant to every possible vocalic allophone of Spanish language is analyzed usi...

Black-box transformations have been extensively studied in algorithmic mechanism design as a generic tool for converting algorithms into truthful mechanisms without degrading the approximation guarantees. While such transformations have been designed for a variety of settings, Chawla et al. showed that no fully general black-box transformation exists for single-parameter environments. In this p...

Component Based Software Development (CBSD) is gaining popularity in recent years. In this way of software development, software components, which are typically black-box components, are intensively reused to construct new systems. To ensure the quality of software systems composed of black-box components, a primary concern is how to ensure the quality of black-box components. Thus, adequate te...

A key aspect of the Object-Oriented (OO) approach is that a designer can enrich an OO system by providing suitable (re-)definitions for some of the methods of the given system. Application frameworks provide good examples of such enrichment. An OO framework typically provides a number of template methods that implement specific patterns of calls to hook methods. An application developer can cus...

Test case prioritization is a technique to improve software testing. Although many works have investigated test case prioritization, they focus on white box testing or regression testing. However, software testing is often outsourced to a software testing company that employs black box testing. Herein a framework is proposed to prioritize test cases for black box testing on a new product using ...

We prove in a non-black-box way that every bounded list and set commitment scheme is knowledge-binding. This is a new and rather strong security condition, which makes the security definitions for time-stamping much more natural compared to the previous definitions, which assume unpredictability of adversaries. As a direct consequence, list and set commitment schemes with partial opening proper...