On the existence of hidden machines in computational time hierarchies

09/02/2020

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by   Felipe S. Abrahão, et al.

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Challenging the standard notion of totality in computable functions, one has that, given any sufficiently expressive formal axiomatic system, there are total functions that, although computable and "intuitively" understood as being total, cannot be proved to be total. In this article we show that this implies the existence of an infinite hierarchy of time complexity classes whose representative members are hidden from (or unknown by) the respective formal axiomatic systems. Although these classes contain total computable functions, there are some of these functions for which the formal axiomatic system cannot recognize as belonging to a time complexity class. This leads to incompleteness results regarding formalizations of computational complexity.