nondeterministic Turing Machine

from The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
Nondeterministic Turing Machine

   <complexity> A normal (deterministic) {Turing Machine} that
   has a "guessing head" - a write-only head that writes a guess
   at a solution on the tape first, based on some arbitrary
   internal {algorithm}.  The regular {Turing Machine} then runs
   and returns "yes" or "no" to indicate whether the solution is
   correct.

   A {nondeterministic Turing Machine} can solve
   {nondeterministic polynomial time} computational {decision
   problems} in a number of steps that is a {polynomial} function
   of the size of the input

   (1995-04-27)
    

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