[daveFNbuck]

I meant that you don't need to know what a Turing machine is to understand what P and NP are or prove that a problem is NP-hard. I've seen a lot of people try to explain these concepts to lay audiences and Turing machines are almost never mentioned.

[fnrslvr]

Fair. The topic is often taught to students without broaching the topic of Turing machines.

I think we agree that as a matter of actually building the topic of NP-completeness, nailing down a concrete model of computation for the verifiers which can itself be operated upon constructively is vital.