ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

EXPSPACE

Okay kiddo, have you ever played a game that has lots and lots of rules and lots of options to choose from? It gets pretty complicated at times, right? Well, a computer has to do the same thing when it plays that game.

Now, you know that computers are super smart and can do a lot of things very fast. But sometimes, even for computers, playing some games or solving certain problems is very, very hard. These are problems that have so many possible options or paths that the computer has to explore (or try out) that it takes a lot of time and memory to solve them.

When a problem like this is too big for a computer to handle, we call the amount of memory and time the computer needs to solve it "exponential space" or "expspace" for short.

Think of it like playing a game where every move you make leads to ten more possible moves, which then lead to even more possible moves. And every time you have to remember all the moves you made before, or you'll forget where you have been in the game.

So, expspace is a way of measuring the amount of memory and time needed for a computer to solve really complicated problems with lots and lots of possible moves or options. It's like trying to remember all the moves you made before, but times a million! It's really difficult and only the most powerful computers can do it.