Sharp P

In computational complexity theory, the complexity class #P (pronounced "number P" or, sometimes "sharp P" or "hash P") is the set of the counting problems associated with the decision problems in the set NP. More formally, #P is the class of function problems of the form "compute ƒ(x)", where ƒ is the number of accepting paths of a nondeterministic Turing machine running in polynomial time. Unlike most well-known complexity classes, it is not a class of decision problems but a class of function problems.

An NP decision problem is often of the form "Are there any solutions that satisfy certain constraints?" For example:

The corresponding #P function problems ask "how many" rather than "are there any". For example:

Clearly, a #P problem must be at least as hard as the corresponding NP problem. If it's easy to count answers, then it must be easy to tell whether there are any answers—just count them and see whether the count is greater than zero.

One consequence of Toda's theorem is that a polynomial-time machine with a #P oracle (P^#P) can solve all problems in PH, the entire polynomial hierarchy. In fact, the polynomial-time machine only needs to make one #P query to solve any problem in PH. This is an indication of the extreme difficulty of solving #P-complete problems exactly.

Surprisingly, some #P problems that are believed to be difficult correspond to easy (for example linear-time) P problems. For more information on this, see #P-complete.

The closest decision problem class to #P is PP, which asks whether a majority (more than half) of the computation paths accept. This finds the most significant bit in the #P problem answer. The decision problem class ⊕P (pronounced "Parity-P") instead asks for the least significant bit of the #P answer.

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