I am trying to (intuitively) understand the two terms "decidability" and "verifiability". I have done a reasonable amount of searching and going through the various texts I can put my hands on. However, their intuitive understanding seems to escape me, specially for the second one. Out of the many definitions found, the following one found in [this page][1], clearly explained decidability to me. > A language is called decidable if there exists a method - any method > at all - to determine whether a given word belongs to that language or > not. However, I fail to find a parallel definition for verifiability. In the [Theory of Computation book by Sipser][2], we find, > P = the class of languages for which membership can be *decided* > quickly. > > NP = the class of languages for which membership can be > *verified* quickly. In light of the above, I want to understand verifiability. Please provide as many examples as you can, at one moment, I try catch the meaning, in the next one, I get confused again. [1]: http://kilby.stanford.edu/~rvg/154/handouts/decidability.html [2]: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Computation-Michael-Sipser/dp/0534950973