CHAPTER 3

COMPUTABILITY
 RECURSIVE AND RECURSIVELY ENUMERABLE LANGUAGES
 Executing the Turing machine may have three outcomes
• Halt and accept the input;
Recursive
• Halt and reject the input; or
• Never halt.
 Theorem 2.1: If both L and Σ∗\L are recursively enumerable, then L is recursive.
 Proof: Let Min accept L and Mout accept Σ*\L. And put these two machines together
with multi tape.
• Then, given an input w and run Min on one tape in parallel with Mout on the other.
• As soon as one of the two simulations halts, we can halt and announce the status of w.
• Since one of the two simulations is guaranteed to halt
• For all w, the new TM can halt by showing that either w∈L or w∉L.
 LANGUAGE ENUMERATOR
• It makes a list of the elements of a language L rather than recognizing
membership in L (for instance, a list of primes, a list of possible
solutions to some optimization problem, . . . ).
• M is said to enumerate L if it produces a sequence
on some output tape where ui ∈ L and # is an extra symbol.
• TE machines always moves to the right, though not necessarily at
every computation step.
• The machine just lists every element of L in some order, and possibly
with repetitions
• If there is a TM that enumerates L, then there is a TM that
enumerates L without repetitions.
• A language L is enumerated by some TM iff it is recursively enumerable.
 CHURCH-TURING THESIS
• States that if an algorithm (a procedure that terminates) exists then there is
an equivalent TM, or recursively-definable function, for that algorithm.
• That means “every computable function is computable by a Turing machine”.
• According to the Church-Turing thesis, any effectively calculable function is
calculable by a Turing machine
• Thus a set S is recursively enumerable iff there is some algorithm which
yields an enumeration of S.
• A set S ⊂ N is called recursive/computable/decidable if there is an algorithm
which terminates after a finite amount of time and correctly decides whether
or not a given number belongs to the set.
 NON-RECURSIVELY ENUMERABLE LANGUAGES
• According to church Turing's thesis, a TM can compute any effective procedure.
• Therefore, there are languages that cannot be defined by any effective procedure.
• This language is called non-recursive enumerable language.
• We find a non-recursively enumerable language X by diagonalization.
• Diagonalization is a proof technique that proves that there are more languages
than Turing machines.
• Since the set of Turing machines is countable, but the set of languages is not!
 WHEN RECURSIVELY ENUMERABLE IMPLIES
RECURSIVE?
• If L is RE, then L may or may not recursive.
• A RE language L is recursive, when its complement is RE.
• If both L and its complement are RE, then L is recursive.
• If L is recursive, its complement also recursive.
• The set of recursive languages is a proper subset of the set of
recursively enumerable languages.
 REPRESENTING MACHINES AS STRINGS
• Meaning ‘treating machines as modules/phrases’. (universal TM)
• This is a description of a TM in English over a finite alphabet particularly in ASCII.
• Example:
‘erase the working tape and write the first string of length 6 on it, then run M
for 6 steps’
• It uses a set alphabet of (0; 1)
• Symbol 0 will be used only as punctuation, everything else is encoded with 1.
• The resulting string representation of M is denote by R(M).
 REPRESENTING MACHINES AS STRINGS(CONT’D)
• An actual alphabet Γ. Call the elements of Γ, a1 through an and encode ai as 1i (a
string of i 1’s).
• A set of states. Call the states q1 through qm and encode qj as 1j
• The directions. Call L, 1 and R, 11.
• The transitions. Transitions can be thought of as 5-tuples (qstart; aread; awrite; dmove; q
finish). So, simply encode these as the encodings of the individual parts separated from one
another by single 0’s.
• The complete set of transitions. Take each transition, encode it, and separate it from the
next by 00.
• The start/finish of the encoding. Add a 000 at the beginning and at the end.
END OF CHAPTER THREE.
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