Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
I owe this almost atrocious variety to an institution which other republics do not know or which operates in them in an imperfect and secret manner: the lottery.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Lottery in Babylon”So far, our approach to computing devices was somewhat conservative: We thought of them as executing a deterministic rule. A more liberal and quite realistic approach, which is pursued in this chapter, considers computing devices that use a probabilistic rule. This relaxation has an immediate impact on the notion of efficient computation, which is consequently associated with probabilistic polynomial-time computations rather than with deterministic (polynomial-time) ones. We stress that the association of efficient computation with probabilistic polynomial-time computation makes sense provided that the failure probability of the latter is negligible (which means that it may be safely ignored).
The quantitative nature of the failure probability of probabilistic algorithms provides one connection between probabilistic algorithms and counting problems. The latter are indeed a new type of computational problems, and our focus is on counting efficiently recognizable objects (e.g., NP-witnesses for a given instance of set in NP). Randomized procedures turn out to play an important role in the study of such counting problems.
Summary: Focusing on probabilistic polynomial-time algorithms, we consider various types of probabilistic failure of such algorithms (e.g., actual error versus failure to produce output). This leads to the formulation of complexity classes such as BPP, RP, and ƵPP. […]
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