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Nondeterministic Turing machine = Deterministic Turing machine

Explore the equivalence between nondeterministic and deterministic Turing machines by learning how to simulate nondeterministic behavior with a deterministic approach. This lesson covers the use of breadth-first traversal on execution trees and practical implementation in Python, deepening your grasp of Turing machine simulations.

Equivalence of a nondeterministic vs. deterministic Turing machine

With the notion of encoding, we can show how to simulate a nondeterministic Turing machine (NTM) with a deterministic one. A nondeterministic Turing machine is one where there are multiple choices for combinations of current state and character:

In other words, for NTM\text{NTM}s, δ\delta is a relation. To simulate an NTM\text{NTM} deterministically, we employ a breadth-first traversal of the tree of ...