Instance complexity

Abstract
We introduce a measure for the computational complexity of individual instances of a decision problem and study some of its properties. The instance complexity of a string x with respect to a set A and time bound t, ic t (x : A), is defined as the size of the smallest special-case program for A that runs in time t, decides x correctly, and makes no mistakes on other strings ("don't know" answers are permitted). We prove that a set A is in P if and only if there exist a polynomial t and a...

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