On Regular Sets of Bounds and Determinism versus Nondeterminism

Abstract

This paper illustrates the richness of the concept of regular sets of time bounds and demonstrates its application to problems of computational complexity. There is a universe of bounds whose regular subsets allow to represent several time complexity classes of common interest and are linearly ordered with respect to the confinality relation which implies the inclusion between the corresponding complexity classes. By means of classical results of complexity theory, the separation of determinism from nondeterminism is possible for a variety of sets of bounds below $n\cdot\log^*(n)$. The system of all regular bound sets ordered by confinality allows the order-isomorphic embedding of, e.g., the ordered set of real numbers or the Cantor discontinuum.