I am reading the Wikipedia article on time-constructible functions and got confused by its definitions, given as follows:
There are two different definitions of a time-constructible function. In the first definition, a function $f$ is called time-constructible if there exists a positive integer $n_0$ and Turing machine $M$ which, given a string $1^n$ consisting of $n$ ones, stops after exactly $f(n)$ steps for all $n \ge n_0$. In the second definition, a function $f$ is called time-constructible if there exists a Turing machine $M$ which, given a string $1^n$, outputs the binary representation of $f(n)$ in $\mathcal{O}(f(n))$ time (a unary representation may be used instead, since the two can be interconverted in $\mathcal{O}(f(n))$ time).1
- If I am not mistaken the two definitions are not equivalent: The first one is more strict.
- I think this definitions are lacking the requirement that $f(n) \ge n$, since the part about converting an unary to a binary representation might not be true as this requires $f(n) \ge n$, i.e. the algorithm needs to be able to read the input, which might not be the case for small enough $f(n)$.
Am I right with this or am I missing something here?
