The papers contained in this volume were presented at the 13th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, held July 3-5, 2002 at the Hotel Uminonakamichi, in Fukuoka, Japan. They were selected from 37 abstracts submitted in response to the call for papers. In addition, there were invited lectures by Shinichi Morishita (University of Tokyo) and Hiroki Arimura (Kyushu University).
Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM) addresses issues of searching and matching strings and more complicated patterns such as trees, regular expressions, graphs, point sets, and arrays, in various formats. The goal is to derive non-trivial combinatorial properties of such structures and to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding computational problems. On the other hand, an important goal is to analyze and pinpoint the properties and conditions under which searches cannot be performed efficiently.