Type-two polynomial-time and restricted lookahead

This paper provides an alternate characterization of second-order polynomial-time computability, with the goal of making second-order complexity theory more approachable. We rely on the usual oracle machines to model programs with subroutine calls. In contrast to previous results, the use of higher-order objects as running times is avoided, either explicitly or implicitly. Instead, regular polynomials are used. This is achieved by refining the notion of oracle-poly-time computability introduced by Cook. We impose a further restriction on oracle interactions to force feasibility. Both the restriction and its purpose are very simple: it is well-known that Cook's model allows polynomial depth iteration of functional inputs with no restrictions on size, and thus does not preserve poly-time computability. To mend this we restrict the number of lookahead revisions, that is the number of times a query whose size exceeds that of any previous query may be asked. We prove that this leads to a class of feasible functionals and that all feasible problems can be solved within this class if one is allowed to separate a task into efficiently solvable subtasks. Formally, the closure of our class under lambda-abstraction and application are the basic feasible functionals. We also revisit the very similar class of strongly poly-time computable operators previously introduced by Kawamura and Steinberg. We prove it to be strictly included in our class and, somewhat surprisingly, to have the same closure property. This is due to the nature of the limited recursion operator: it is not strongly poly-time but decomposes into two such operations and lies in our class.