Research Article

Physical Portrayal of Computational Complexity

Figure 7

Venn diagram for the computational complexity classes 𝑃 , 𝑁 𝑃 -complete and 𝑁 𝑃 based on the thermodynamic analysis of computation. The class 𝑃 problems can be computed by dissipative processes that have less than three degrees of freedom whereas the class 𝑁 𝑃 problem computation involves also dissipative processes with three or more degrees of freedom. The class 𝑁 𝑃 -complete problem computation contains only dissipative processes with three or more degrees of freedom.
321372.fig.007