Imposters Handbook_ A CS Primer for Self-Taught Developers, The - Rob Conery
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Anyway, he pointed out to me that there was a symposium on exactly my question: What Is Computation: What is computation? This has always been the most fundamental question of our feld. In the 1930s, as the feld was starting, the answer was that computation was the action of people who operated calculator machines. By the late 1940s, the answer was that computation was steps carried out by automated computers to produce defnite outputs. That defnition did very well: it remained the standard for nearly ffty years. But it is now being challenged. People in many felds have accepted that computational thinking is a way of approaching science and engineering. The Internet is full of servers that provide nonstop computation endlessly. Researchers in biology and physics have claimed the discovery of natural computational processes that have nothing to do with computers. How must our defnition evolve to answer the challenges of brains computing, algorithms never terminating by design, computation as a natural occurrence, and computation without computers
These problems are classifed as NP: problems solvable in P time given a nondeterministic algorithm. NP can be thought of as a bit of a mythical time frame, because we simply don’t know if a nondeterministic algorithm is possible. If it is possible, then we can say that a given problem (like our pub selection problem) is solvable in nondeterministic polynomial time; which is what NP stands for