DTIME

In computational complexity theory, DTIME (or TIME) is the computational resource of computation time for a deterministic Turing machine. It represents the amount of time (or number of computation steps) that a "normal" physical computer would take to solve a certain computational problem using a certain algorithm. It is one of the most well-studied complexity resources, because it corresponds so closely to an important real-world resource (the amount of time it takes a computer to solve a problem).

The resource DTIME is used to define complexity classes, sets of all of the decision problems which can be solved using a certain amount of computation time. If a problem of input size n can require f(n) computation time to solve, we have a complexity class DTIME(f(n)) (or TIME(f(n))). There is no restriction on the amount of memory space used, but there may be restrictions on some other complexity resources (like alternation).