Recognizing primes in random polynomial time
STOC '87 Proceedings of the nineteenth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
On one-way functions and polynomial-time isomorphisms
Theoretical Computer Science
Complexity measures for public-key cryptosystems
SIAM Journal on Computing - Special issue on cryptography
On generating all maximal independent sets
Information Processing Letters
Pseudo-random generation from one-way functions
STOC '89 Proceedings of the twenty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Universal one-way hash functions and their cryptographic applications
STOC '89 Proceedings of the twenty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
SIAM Journal on Computing
One-way functions are necessary and sufficient for secure signatures
STOC '90 Proceedings of the twenty-second annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Pseudo-random generators under uniform assumptions
STOC '90 Proceedings of the twenty-second annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Algebraic methods for interactive proof systems
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Efficient algorithms for listing combinatorial structures
Efficient algorithms for listing combinatorial structures
Program Result Checking: A New Approach to Making Programs More Reliable
ICALP '93 Proceedings of the 20th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming
Testing Hereditary Properties Efficiently on Average
ORDAL '94 Proceedings of the International Workshop on Orders, Algorithms, and Applications
Proceedings of the 4th GI-Conference on Theoretical Computer Science
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
We address the question of how one evaluates the usefulness of a heuristic program on a particular input. If theoretical tools do not allow us to decide for every instance whether a particular heuristic is fast enough, might we at least write a simple, fast companion program that makes this decision on some inputs of interest? We call such a companion program a timer for the heuristic. Timers are related to program checkers, as defined by Blum (1993), in the following sense: Checkers are companion programs that check the correctness of the output produced by (unproven but bounded‐time) programs on particular instances; timers, on the other hand, are companion programs that attempt to bound the running time on particular instances of correct programs whose running times have not been fully analyzed. This paper provides a family of definitions that formalize the notion of a timer and some preliminary results that demonstrate the utility of these definitions.