Abstract
Many fundamental questions in complexity theory can be formulated as a language recognition problem, where by language L we understand a set of strings over a finite alphabet, say Σ = {0, 1}. The basic question is then to determine the computational resources (such as time, space, number of processors, energy consumption of a chip, etc.) needed in determining whether or not x ∈ L, for any string x ∈ Σ*. In turn, if for any n we let f n denote the characteristic function of L ∩{0, 1} n , then the previous question can be rephrased as a problem of determining the computational resources needed to compute the boolean function f n (x), for arbitrary x, n.
Mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of conducting us to the knowledge of a mathematical law, ... H. Poincaré [Poi52]
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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Clote, P., Kranakis, E. (2002). Boolean Functions and Circuits. In: Boolean Functions and Computation Models. Texts in Theoretical Computer Science. An EATCS Series. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04943-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04943-3_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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