CHAPTER 14
AN OVERVIEW OF COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY
CHAPTER SUMMARY
While in previous discussions on Turing machines the issue was only whether or not something could be done in principle, here the focus shifts to how well things can be done in practice. In this final chapter, we introduce the second part of the theory of computation: complexity theory, an extensive topic that deals with the efficiency of computation. We briefly describe some typical issues in complexity theory, including the role of nondeterminism.
We now reconsider computational complexity, the study of the efficiency of algorithms. Complexity, briefly mentioned in Chapter 11, complements computability by separating problems that can be solved in practice from those that can ...
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