Polynomial Time

Abstract problems: To understand the class of polynomial-time solvable problems, we must first have a formal notion of what a "problem" is. We define an abstract problem Q to be a binary relation on a set I of problem instances and a set S of problem solutions. For example, an instance for SHORTEST-PATH is a triple consisting of a graph and two vertices. A solution is a sequence of vertices in the graph, with perhaps the empty sequence denoting that no path exists. The problem SHORTEST-PATH itself is the relation that associates each instance of a graph and two vertices with a shortest path in the graph that connects the two vertices. Since shortest paths are not necessarily unique, a given problem instance may have more than one solution.

This formulation of an abstract problem is more general than is required for our purposes. As we saw above, the theory of NP-completeness restricts attention to decision problems: those having a yes/no solution. In this case, we can view an abstract decision problem as a function that maps the instance set I to the solution set {0, 1}. For example, a decision problem related to SHORTEST-PATH is the problem PATH that we saw earlier. If i = 〈G, u, v, k〉 is an instance of the decision problem PATH, then PATH(i) = 1 (yes) if a shortest path from u to v has at most k edges, and PATH(i) = 0 (no) otherwise. Many abstract problems are not decision problems, but rather optimization problems, in which some value must be minimized or maximized. As we saw above, however, it is usually a simple matter to recast an optimization problem as a decision problem that is no harder.

Encodings: If a computer program is to solve an abstract problem, problem instances must be represented in a way that the program understands. An encoding of a set S of abstract objects is a mapping e from S to the set of binary strings. For example, we are all familiar with encoding the natural numbers N = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4,...} as the strings {0, 1, 10, 11, 100,...}. Using this encoding, e(17) = 10001. Anyone who has looked at computer representations of keyboard characters is familiar with either the ASCII or EBCDIC codes. In the ASCII code, the encoding of A is 1000001. Even a compound object can be encoded as a binary string by combining the representations of its constituent parts. Polygons, graphs, functions, ordered pairs, programs-all can be encoded as binary strings.

Thus, a computer algorithm that "solves" some abstract decision problem actually takes an encoding of a problem instance as input. We call a problem whose instance set is the set of binary strings a concrete problem. We say that an algorithm solves a concrete problem in time O(T (n)) if, when it is provided a problem instance i of length n = |i|, the algorithm can produce the solution in O(T (n)) time. A concrete problem is polynomial-time solvable, therefore, if there exists an algorithm to solve it in time O(n^k) for some constant k.

We can now formally define the complexity class P as the set of concrete decision problems that are polynomial-time solvable.

1. We can use encodings to map abstract problems to concrete problems. Given an abstract decision problem Q mapping an instance set I to {0, 1}, an encoding e : I → {0, 1}* can be used to induce a related concrete decision problem, which we denote by e(Q). If the solution to an abstract-problem instance i ∈ I is Q(i) ∈ {0, 1}, then the solution to the concrete-problem instance e(i) ∈ {0, 1}* is also Q(i). As a technicality, there may be some binary strings that represent no meaningful abstract-problem instance. For convenience, we shall assume that any such string is mapped arbitrarily to 0. Thus, the concrete problem produces the same solutions as the abstract problem on binary-string instances that represent the encodings of abstract-problem instances.
2. We would like to extend the definition of polynomial-time solvability from concrete problems to abstract problems by using encodings as the bridge, but we would like the definition to be independent of any particular encoding. That is, the efficiency of solving a problem should not depend on how the problem is encoded. Unfortunately, it depends quite heavily on the encoding. For example, suppose that an integer k is to be provided as the sole input to an algorithm, and suppose that the running time of the algorithm is Θ(k). If the integer k is provided in unary-a string of k 1's-then the running time of the algorithm is O(n) on length-n inputs, which is polynomial time. If we use the more natural binary representation of the integer k, however, then the input length is n = ⌊lg k⌋ 1. In this case, the running time of the algorithm is Θ (k) = Θ(2ⁿ), which is exponential in the size of the input. Thus, depending on the encoding, the algorithm runs in either polynomial or superpolynomial time.
3. The encoding of an abstract problem is therefore quite important to our under-standing of polynomial time. We cannot really talk about solving an abstract problem without first specifying an encoding. Nevertheless, in practice, if we rule out "expensive" encodings such as unary ones, the actual encoding of a problem makes little difference to whether the problem can be solved in polynomial time. For example, representing integers in base 3 instead of binary has no effect on whether a problem is solvable in polynomial time, since an integer represented in base 3 can be converted to an integer represented in base 2 in polynomial time.
4. We say that a function f : {0, 1}* → {0,1}* is polynomial-time computable if there exists a polynomial-time algorithm A that, given any input x ∈ {0, 1}*, produces as output f (x). For some set I of problem instances, we say that two encodings e₁ and e₂ are polynomially related if there exist two polynomial-time computable functions f₁₂ and f₂₁ such that for any i ∈ I , we have f₁₂(e₁(i)) = e₂(i) and f₂₁(e₂(i)) = e₁(i).^[5] That is, the encoding e₂(i) can be computed from the encoding e₁(i) by a polynomial-time algorithm, and vice versa. If two encodings e₁ and e₂ of an abstract problem are polynomially related, whether the problem is polynomial-time solvable or not is independent of which encoding we use, as the following lemma shows.