# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged undecidability

4

You said in a comment: I am talking to process this encoding, not the tape content. But the tape content affects the behavior of the TM, including whether it would enter an accepting state. The exact same TM in the exact same state might later accept, or not accept, depending only on what is on the tape. You want to "go through all encoded transitions ...

3

Your example almost works. You need to make sure that the regular part is disjoint from the non-decidable part. Suppose our alphabet has at least two symbols, say $a$ and $b$. Consider any undecidable langauge $H$, for example the halting set, and define $$L_2 = \lbrace b w \mid w \in H\rbrace$$ and $$L_1 = L_2 \cup \lbrace a \rbrace.$$ Now it is obvious ...

2

Because this process doesn't necessarily end; you can end up discovering more and more possible configurations (state+tape) which would lead to accepting if they were ever reached, but never a legal initial configuration.

2

Concretely, we are always dealing with syntactical transformations, regardless whether there is a semantic theory that renders these transformations intelligible to us, or not. In the end, our ability to automatically demonstrate that two different programs are equivalent is restricted to properties that can be defined syntactically. Even then, there are ...

2

Your problem is decidable. If $M$ always executes less than 5 steps, then it never sees more than the first 4 symbols of its input. Hence it suffices to run $M$ on all inputs of length at most 4.

2

$D$ verifies $\langle M \rangle$ is a (deterministic) TM and then builds the configurations graph and checks if the initial configuration of $\epsilon$ is connected to an accept state (there are only finitely many) and returns true if there is and false if there isn't. The problem here is that, even if you define the TM so that there are only finitely many ...

2

Just take for $L_2$ an undecidable language of $a^*$ and take $L_1 = L_2 \cup \{b\}$. Then $L_2$ is also undecidable and $L_2 - L_1 = \{b\}$ is regular.

2

As you suspected, it can happen that $L_1-L_2\not=a^*$. The assumption that $H$ does not contain $a^*$ does not imply that $\lnot H$ must contain $a^*$. For example, if $H\cap a^*= \{a^2\}$, then $\lnot H$ does not contain $a^2$, let alone $a^*$. The technique to arrive at a simple solution is to let the regular part be disjoint with $L_2$. Here is the ...

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