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A deterministic Turing machine has a transition function that, for a given state and symbol under the tape head, specifies three things: the symbol to be written to the tape (it may be the same as the symbol currently in that position, or not even write at all, resulting in no practical change),
NP is the set of decision problems for which the problem instances, where the answer is "yes", have proofs verifiable in polynomial time by a deterministic Turing machine, or alternatively the set of problems that can be solved in polynomial time by a nondeterministic Turing machine. [2]
An oracle machine or o-machine is a Turing a-machine that pauses its computation at state "o" while, to complete its calculation, it "awaits the decision" of "the oracle"—an entity unspecified by Turing "apart from saying that it cannot be a machine" (Turing (1939), The Undecidable, p. 166–168).
If the action table has at most one entry for each combination of symbol and state then the machine is a "deterministic Turing machine" (DTM). If the action table contains multiple entries for a combination of symbol and state then the machine is a "non-deterministic Turing machine" (NDTM).
In this name, "nondeterministic" refers to nondeterministic Turing machines, a way of mathematically formalizing the idea of a brute-force search algorithm. Polynomial time refers to an amount of time that is considered "quick" for a deterministic algorithm to check a single solution, or for a nondeterministic Turing machine to perform the ...
Class of computational decision problems for which any given yes-solution can be verified as a solution in polynomial time by a deterministic Turing machine (or solvable by a non-deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time). NP-hard Class of problems which are at least as hard as the hardest problems in NP.
An alternating Turing machine (or to be more precise, the definition of acceptance for such a machine) alternates between these modes. An alternating Turing machine is a non-deterministic Turing machine whose states are divided into two sets: existential states and universal states. An existential state is accepting if some transition leads to ...
If there is an algorithm (say a Turing machine, or a computer program with unbounded memory) that produces the correct answer for any input string of length n in at most cn k steps, where k and c are constants independent of the input string, then we say that the problem can be solved in polynomial time and we place it in the class P. Formally ...