When is a paper `Easily Available' ?
Computational Complexity 2023-02-13
I was looking at the paper
PSPACE-Completeness of reversible deterministic systems
by Erik Demaine, Robert Hearn, Dylan Hendrickson, and Jayson Lynch (see here) and came across the following fascinating result which I paraphrase:
The problem of, given balls on a pool table (though it can be one you devise which is not the standard one) and each balls initial position and velocity, and a particular ball and place, it is PSPACE complete to determine if that ball ever gets to that place.
Demaine et al. stated that this was proven by Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli in 1982 (see here for a link to the 1982 paper, not behind a paywall). Demaine et al. gave an easier proof with some nice properties. (Just in case the link goes away I downloaded the paper to my files and you can find it here.)
I needed the bib reference for the FT-1982 paper and rather than copy it from Demaine et al. I wanted to cut-and-paste, so I looked for it in DBLP. I didn't find the 1982 paper but I did find a book from 2002 that reprinted it. The book, Collision-based computing, has a website here. The book itself is behind a paywall.
On the website is the following curious statement:
[This book] Gives a state-of-the-art overview of an emerging topic, on which there is little published literature at the moment. [The book] Includes 2 classic paper, both of which are widely referred to but are NOT EASILY AVAILABLE (E. Fredkin and T. Toffoli: Conservative Logic, and N . Margolous Physics-Like Models of Computation).
The caps are mine.
Not easily available? I found a link in less than a minute, and I used it above when I pointed to the paper.
But the book IS behind a paywall.
Perhaps Springer does not know that the article is easily available. That would be odd since the place I found the article is also a Springer website.
The notion of EASILY AVAILABLE is very odd. While not quite related, it reminds me of when MIT Press had to pay a few thousand dollars for permission (that might not be the legal term) to reprint Turing's 1936 paper where he defined Turing Machines (he didn't call them that), which is on line here (and other places), for Harry Lewis's book Ideas that created the future.