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In computability theory, an undecidable problem is a decision problem for which an effective method (algorithm) to derive the correct answer does not exist. More formally, an undecidable problem is a problem whose language is not a recursive set ; see the article Decidable language .
An example of a decision problem is deciding with the help of an algorithm whether a given natural number is prime. Another example is the problem, "given two numbers x and y, does x evenly divide y?" A method for solving a decision problem, given in the form of an algorithm, is called a decision procedure for that problem.
A primality test is an algorithm for determining whether an input number is prime.Among other fields of mathematics, it is used for cryptography.Unlike integer factorization, primality tests do not generally give prime factors, only stating whether the input number is prime or not.
Those inputs can be numbers (for example, the decision problem "is the input a prime number?") or values of some other kind, such as strings of a formal language. The formal representation of a decision problem is a subset of the natural numbers. For decision problems on natural numbers, the set consists of those numbers that the decision ...
Fermat's little theorem states that if p is prime and a is not divisible by p, then a p − 1 ≡ 1 ( mod p ) . {\displaystyle a^{p-1}\equiv 1{\pmod {p}}.} If one wants to test whether p is prime, then we can pick random integers a not divisible by p and see whether the congruence holds.
This is a list of some of the more commonly known problems that are NP-complete when expressed as decision problems. As there are thousands of such problems known, this list is in no way comprehensive. Many problems of this type can be found in Garey & Johnson (1979).
This occurs for example when n is a probable prime to base a but not a strong probable prime to base a. [20]: 1402 If x is a nontrivial square root of 1 modulo n, since x 2 ≡ 1 (mod n), we know that n divides x 2 − 1 = (x − 1)(x + 1); since x ≢ ±1 (mod n), we know that n does not divide x − 1 nor x + 1.
In logic, negation, also called the logical not or logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition to another proposition "not ", written , , ′ [1] or ¯. [ citation needed ] It is interpreted intuitively as being true when P {\displaystyle P} is false, and false when P {\displaystyle P} is true.