Abstract
A decision problem is a general question to be answered, usually possessing several parameters, or free variables, whose values are left unspecified. An instance of a problem is obtained by specifying particular values for all of the problem parameters.
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Notes
- 1.
This denotes the function of one variable that one obtains by holding the value of e fixed and letting x vary. Lambda-notation is familiar, for example, to students who have studied the programming language Lisp.
- 2.
Church’s thesis, remember, is a statement of philosophical belief and so should not be cited as part of the proof of the theorem. For this reason, let us clarify our position. We are not yielding to Church’s thesis as much as we are to our reader’s ability as trained programmers. We take it for granted that if we understand a procedure, then we can program a Turing machine to implement the procedure.
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Homer, S., Selman, A.L. (2011). Undecidability. In: Computability and Complexity Theory. Texts in Computer Science. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0682-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0682-2_3
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