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6k views

What is the difference between quantum TM and nondetermistic TM?

I was going through the discussion on the question How to define quantum Turing machines? and I feel that quantum TM and nondetermistic TM are one and the same. The answers to the other question do ...
16k views

Hash tables versus binary trees

When implementing a dictionary ('I want to look up customer data by their customer IDs'), the typical data structures used are hash tables and binary search trees. I know for instance that the C++ STL ...
939 views

Equivalence of Büchi automata and linear $\mu$-calculus

It's a known fact that every LTL formula can be expressed by a Büchi $\omega$-automaton. But, apparently, Büchi automata are a more powerful, expressive model. I've heard somewhere that Büchi automata ...
2k views

Rice's theorem for non-semantic properties

Rice's theorem tell us that the only semantic properties of Turing Machines (i.e. the properties of the function computed by the machine) that we can decide are the two trivial properties (i.e. always ...
5k views

Boolean search explained

My mother is taking some online course in order to be a librarian of sorts, in this course they cover boolean searches, so they can search databases efficiently, however, she got a question sounding ...
5k views

Are algorithms (and efficiency in general) getting less important?

Since buying computation power is much affordable than in the past, are the knowledge of algorithms and being efficient getting less important? It's clear that you would want to avoid an infinite loop,...
4k views

Church-Turing Thesis and computational power of neural networks

The Church-Turing thesis states that everything that can physically be computed, can be computed on a Turing Machine. The paper "Analog computation via neural networks" (Siegelmannn and Sontag, ...
4k views

What did Turing mean when saying that “machines cannot give rise to surprises” is due to a fallacy?

I encountered below statement by Alan M. Turing here: "The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are ...
2k views

Why is Relativization a barrier?

When I was explaining the Baker-Gill-Solovay proof that there exists an oracle with which we can have, $\mathsf{P} = \mathsf{NP}$, and an oracle with which we can have $\mathsf{P} \neq \mathsf{NP}$ to ...
4k views

Is Lambda Calculus purely syntactic?

I've been reading for a few weeks about the Lambda Calculus, but I have not yet seen anything that is materially distinct from existing mathematical functions, and I want to know whether it is just a ...
3k views

What's really meant by context-free in the term context-free grammar?

I have been studying compilers for a while, and I have been searching what's meant by "context" in grammar and what it means for grammar to be "context-free", but with no result. So can anyone help ...
13k views

Generalised 3SUM (k-SUM) problem?

The 3SUM problem tries to identify 3 integers $a,b,c$ from a set $S$ of size $n$ such that $a + b + c = 0$. It is conjectured that there is not better solution than quadratic, i.e. $\mathcal{o}(n^2)$....
5k views

Why are there more non-computable functions than computable ones?

I'm currently reading a book in algorithms and complexity. At the moment I'm, reading about computable and non-computable functions, and my book states that there are many more functions that are non-...
4k views

Why are the total functions not enumerable?

We learned about the concept of enumerations of functions. In practice, they correspond to programming languages. In a passing remark, the professor mentioned that the class of all total functions (i....
5k views

How to determine likely connections in a social network?

I am curious in determining an approach to tackling a "suggested friends" algorithm. Facebook has a feature in which it will recommended individuals to you which it thinks you may be acquainted with. ...
581 views

Characterization of lambda-terms that have union types

Many textbooks cover intersection types in the lambda-calculus. The typing rules for intersection can be defined as follows (on top of the simply typed lambda-calculus with subtyping):  \dfrac{\...
2k views

Do subqueries add expressive power to SQL queries?

Does SQL need subqueries? Imagine a sufficiently generalized implementation of the structured query language for relation databases. Since the structure of the canonical SQL ...
4k views

Where to get graphs to test my search algorithms against?

I am implementing a set of path finding algorithms such as Dijkstra's, Depth First, etc. At first I used a couple of self made graphs, but now I'd like to take the challenge a bit further and thus I'...
10k views

How hard is counting the number of simple paths between two nodes in a directed graph?

There is an easy polynomial algorithm to decide whether there is a path between two nodes in a directed graph (just do a routine graph traversal with, say, depth-first-search). However it seems that, ...
652 views

Why do neural networks seem to perform better with restrictions placed on their topology?

Fully connected (at least layer to layer with more than 2 hidden layers) backprop networks are universal learners. Unfortunately, they are often slow to learn and tend to over-fit or have awkward ...
686 views

10k views

Counting binary trees

(I'm a student with some mathematical background and I'd like to know how to count the number of a specific kind of binary trees.) Looking at Wikipedia page for Binary Trees, I've noticed this ...
8k views

Generating Combinations from a set of pairs without repetition of elements

I have a set of pairs. Each pair is of the form (x,y) such that x,y belong to integers from the range [0,n). So, if the n is 4, then I have the following pairs: <...
25k views

How to prove greedy algorithm is correct

I have a greedy algorithm that I suspect might be correct, but I'm not sure. How do I check whether it is correct? What are the techniques to use for proving a greedy algorithm correct? Are there ...
69k views

What exactly is the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning?

I am trying to understand clustering methods. What I I think I understood: In supervised learning, the categories/labels data is assigned to are known before computation. So, the labels, classes or ...