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### How can it be decidable whether $\pi$ has some sequence of digits?

We were given the following exercise. Let $\qquad \displaystyle f(n) = \begin{cases} 1 & 0^n \text{ occurs in the decimal representation of } \pi \\ 0 & \text{else}\end{cases}$ ...
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### What is meant by “solvable by non deterministic algorithm in polynomial time” [duplicate]

In many textbooks NP problems are defined as: Set of all decision problems solvable by non deterministic algorithms in polynomial time I couldn't understand the part "solvable by non deterministic ...
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### Why NFA is called Non-deterministic?

I have this [kind of funny] question in mind. Why is the non-deterministic finite automaton called non-deterministic while we define the transitions for inputs. Well, even though there are multiple ...
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### How does a nondeterministic Turing machine work?

What is differences between deterministic and nondeterministic Turing machines? Different but equivalent models of NDTM. In particular, what is this frequently used phrase "nondeterministically guess"?...
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### Push Down Automatons “guess” - what does that mean?

I realize non-deterministic pushdown automata can be an improvement over deterministic ones as they can "choose" among several states and there are some context-free languages which cannot be accepted ...
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### What is determinism in computer science?

I was asked if my computer program (in Java) was deterministic. I'm wondering how could it be not? There is no such thing as a non-deterministic Java program right? Even if I use a random number ...
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### Why nondeterminism?

Theory of computation often involves nondeterministic models of computation. Some examples include nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs), nondeterministic pushdown automata (PDAs), and ...
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### How is a nondeterminisitic automaton running on an input?

A nondeterministic automaton, after reading an input symbol at some state, may jump into any of a (finite?) number of states. Does the automaton uniformly randomly choose one out of the several ...
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### DFA's with more than one initial state

( This may be related to NFAs with more than one initial state ) Consider a dfa $M$ with alphabet $\Sigma$ and states $Q$, typically also characterized by a specific initial state $q_0\in Q$. As the ...
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### Why does NTIME consider the length of the longest computation?

In Sipser's textbook "Introduction to the Theory of Computation, Second Edition," he defines nondeterministic time complexity as follows: Let $N$ be a nondeterministic Turing machine that is a ...
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### Length of the certificate in complexity classes

A nondeterministic machine trying to decide membership in a language is presented with a hint (called a "witness" or "certificate") which proves membership (no such witness is provided for ...
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### Algorithms which are both deterministic and non-deterministic

I'm just starting my second year in computer science and one of my classes briefly touched upon deterministic vs. non-deterministic algorithms. This got me thinking - is there any use for algorithms ...
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### Can an algorithm be truly non-deterministic?

I read the term "non-deterministic algorithm" in many places but I don't see how an algorithm can be truly non-deterministic. Typically, there is some source of randomness in these algorithms. If the ...