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[1]: 226 Since this function is generally difficult to compute exactly, and the running time for small inputs is usually not consequential, one commonly focuses on the behavior of the complexity when the input size increases—that is, the asymptotic behavior of the complexity. Therefore, the time complexity is commonly expressed using big O ...
The beginning of systematic studies in computational complexity is attributed to the seminal 1965 paper "On the Computational Complexity of Algorithms" by Juris Hartmanis and Richard E. Stearns, which laid out the definitions of time complexity and space complexity, and proved the hierarchy theorems. [20]
This includes the memory space used by its inputs, called input space, and any other (auxiliary) memory it uses during execution, which is called auxiliary space. Similar to time complexity, space complexity is often expressed asymptotically in big O notation, such as (), (), (), (), etc., where n is a characteristic of the input influencing ...
Turing machines enable intuitive notions of "time" and "space". The time complexity of a TM on a particular input is the number of elementary steps that the Turing machine takes to reach either an accept or reject state. The space complexity is the number of cells on its tape that it uses to reach either an accept or reject state.
The hierarchy theorems are used to demonstrate that the time and space complexity classes form a hierarchy where classes with tighter bounds contain fewer languages than those with more relaxed bounds. Here we define and prove the space hierarchy theorem. The space hierarchy theorems rely on the concept of space-constructible functions.
However, the time hierarchy theorems provide no means to relate deterministic and non-deterministic complexity, or time and space complexity, so they cast no light on the great unsolved questions of computational complexity theory: whether P and NP, NP and PSPACE, PSPACE and EXPTIME, or EXPTIME and NEXPTIME are equal or not.
An alternative characterization of PSPACE is the set of problems decidable by an alternating Turing machine in polynomial time, sometimes called APTIME or just AP. [4]A logical characterization of PSPACE from descriptive complexity theory is that it is the set of problems expressible in second-order logic with the addition of a transitive closure operator.
In computational complexity theory, Savitch's theorem, proved by Walter Savitch in 1970, gives a relationship between deterministic and non-deterministic space complexity. It states that for any function f ∈ Ω ( log ( n ) ) {\displaystyle f\in \Omega (\log(n))} ,