Np Easy

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In complexity theory, the complexity class NP-easy is the set of function problems that are solvable in polynomial time by a deterministic Turing machine with an oracle for some decision problem in NP. In other words, a problem X is NP-easy if and only if there exists some problem Y in NP such that X is polynomial-time Turing reducible to Y. This means that given an oracle for Y, there exists an algorithm that solves X in polynomial time (possibly by repeatedly using that oracle). NP-easy is another name for FPNP (see the function problem article) or for F¿2P (see the polynomial hierarchy article). An example of an NP-easy problem is the problem of sorting a list of strings. The decision problem "is string A greater than string B" is in NP. There are algorithms such as Quicksort that can sort the list using only a polynomial number of calls to the comparison routine, plus a polynomial amount of additional work. Therefore, sorting is NP-easy.