 Oracle Turing machine

An oracle Turing machine is a Turing machine with an additional query operation for a fixed formal language $A$. It writes a finite query $x$ on a designated tape and receives the membership answer $x\in A$ in one oracle step. Writing the query still takes ordinary machine work. The oracle's internal solution procedure is excluded from the cost model.

For example, a machine with an oracle for Boolean satisfiability can ask whether a given Boolean formula has a satisfying assignment. By fixing variables one at a time and querying satisfiability again, it can recover an assignment with at most one additional query per variable. The example turns decision access into search access; it does not provide an ordinary fast satisfiability solver. Oracles let computability theory and computational complexity theory compare problems while making the granted information explicit.^[ref]