On models of a nondeterministic computation

Abstract

In this paper we consider a nondeterministic computation by deterministic multi-head 2-way automata having a read-only access to an auxiliary memory. The memory contains additional data (a guess) and computation is successful iff it is successful for some memory content. Also we consider the case of restricted guesses in which a guess should satisfy some constraint. We show that the standard complexity classes such as L, NL, P, NP, PSPACE can be characterized in terms of these models of nondeterministic computation. These characterizations differ from the well-known ones by absence of alternation.