Comment by eru
4 hours ago
And that's fine. But here the question is perfectly well specified and properly formulated and not ambiguous at all.
The problem is that this formal question might not correspond to the informal question we actually care about.
You can hold that position if you like but you should do so knowing that the vast majority of people (including math people) would say that a formalism that classifies a technically-subexponential solution to an NP-complete problem as “efficient” is in fact improperly formulated, because the goal was specifically to formalize our intuition of efficiency. Our formulation in that case would have failed to do the single thing we laid out for it. Textbook improper formulation. There is not another way of putting this.