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Why Computer Scientists Need Magic 8 Ball-Like Oracles
Hypothetical devices that can quickly and accurately answer questions have become a powerful tool in computational complexity theory.
They often imagine they can consult hypothetical devices called oracles that can instantly, and correctly, answer specific questions. They’re concerned with the inherent difficulty of problems such as determining whether a number is prime or finding the shortest path between two points in a network. Complexity theorists suspect that NP does not equal P, but they can’t prove it, even though they’ve been trying to pin down the relationship between the two classes for over 50 years.
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