NC (complexity)

In computational complexity theory, the class NC (for "Nick's Class") is the set of decision problems decidable in polylogarithmic time on a parallel computer with a polynomial number of processors. In other words, a problem with input size n is in NC if there exist constants c and k such that it can be solved in time O(logc n) using O(nk) parallel processors. Stephen Cook coined the name "Nick's class" after Nick Pippenger, who had done extensive research on circuits with polylogarithmic depth and polynomial size. RNC is a class extending NC with access to randomness.

Comment
enIn computational complexity theory, the class NC (for "Nick's Class") is the set of decision problems decidable in polylogarithmic time on a parallel computer with a polynomial number of processors. In other words, a problem with input size n is in NC if there exist constants c and k such that it can be solved in time O(logc n) using O(nk) parallel processors. Stephen Cook coined the name "Nick's class" after Nick Pippenger, who had done extensive research on circuits with polylogarithmic depth and polynomial size. RNC is a class extending NC with access to randomness.
Has abstract
enIn computational complexity theory, the class NC (for "Nick's Class") is the set of decision problems decidable in polylogarithmic time on a parallel computer with a polynomial number of processors. In other words, a problem with input size n is in NC if there exist constants c and k such that it can be solved in time O(logc n) using O(nk) parallel processors. Stephen Cook coined the name "Nick's class" after Nick Pippenger, who had done extensive research on circuits with polylogarithmic depth and polynomial size. Just as the class P can be thought of as the tractable problems (Cobham's thesis), so NC can be thought of as the problems that can be efficiently solved on a parallel computer. NC is a subset of P because polylogarithmic parallel computations can be simulated by polynomial-time sequential ones. It is unknown whether NC = P, but most researchers suspect this to be false, meaning that there are probably some tractable problems that are "inherently sequential" and cannot significantly be sped up by using parallelism. Just as the class NP-complete can be thought of as "probably intractable", so the class P-complete, when using NC reductions, can be thought of as "probably not parallelizable" or "probably inherently sequential". The parallel computer in the definition can be assumed to be a parallel, random-access machine (PRAM). That is a parallel computer with a central pool of memory, and any processor can access any bit of memory in constant time. The definition of NC is not affected by the choice of how the PRAM handles simultaneous access to a single bit by more than one processor. It can be CRCW, CREW, or EREW. See PRAM for descriptions of those models. Equivalently, NC can be defined as those decision problems decidable by a uniform Boolean circuit (which can be calculated from the length of the input, for NC, we suppose we can compute the Boolean circuit of size n in logarithmic space in n) with polylogarithmic depth and a polynomial number of gates with a maximum fan-in of 2. RNC is a class extending NC with access to randomness.
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NC (complexity)
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enNC (complexity)
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www.google.com/books/edition/Introduction_to_Circuit_Complexity/55ZTgOJs8bsC%3Fgbpv=1
archive.org/details/finiteautomatafo0000stra
www.cs.armstrong.edu/greenlaw/research/PARALLEL/limits.pdf
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AC (complexity)
Addition
Alternating Turing machine
Big O notation
Binary tree
Boolean circuit
Cambridge University Press
Carry-lookahead adder
Category:Circuit complexity
Category:Complexity classes
Cobham's thesis
Commutator
Computational complexity theory
Conjugacy class
Decision problem
Euclidean algorithm
Gaussian elimination
L (complexity)
Logical operator
Majority function
Matrix inverse
Matrix multiplication
Nick Pippenger
NL (complexity)
NP-complete
P (complexity)
Parallel computing
Parallel random access machine
P-complete
Polylogarithmic
Polylogarithmic time
Ripple carry adder
Solvable group
Springer-Verlag
Stephen Cook
Sylvester matrix
Uniformity (circuit)
SameAs
BvhQ
m.05jrf
NC (clase de complejidad)
NC (complessità)
NC (complexidade)
NC (Complexitat)
NC (complexité)
NC (complexity)
NC (Komplexitätsklasse)
NC (độ phức tạp)
NC (复杂度)
NC (計算複雑性理論)
NC (복잡도)
Q1141840
Класс NC
Клас складності NC
סיבוכיות מעגלים
Subject
Category:Circuit complexity
Category:Complexity classes
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