Notes on Space - Bounded Complexity

A machine solves a problem using space s(·) if, for every input x, the machine outputs the correct answer and uses only the first s(|x|) cells of the tape. For a standard Turing machine, we can’t do better than linear space since x itself must be on the tape. So we will often consider a machine with multiple tapes: a read-only “input” tape, a read/write “work” or “memory” tape, and possibly a write-once “output” tape. Then we can say the machine uses space s if for input x, it uses only the first s(|x|) cells of the work tape. We denote by L the set of decision problems solvable in O(log n) space. We denote by PSPACE the set of decision problems solvable in polynomial space. A first observation is that a space-efficient machine is, to a certain extent, also a time-efficient one. In general we denote by SPACE(s(n)) the set of decision problems that can be solved using space at most s(n) on inputs of length n.