Topic : Undecidability in

TOC
Instructor Dr Fareeha Anwar

Group Member : Irum Shahzadi

Samina kousar
 In the theory of computation, decision problems that are answered
either 'yes' or 'no'. The class of problems which can be answered as
'yes' are called solvable or decidable. Otherwise, the class of problems
is said to be unsolvable or undecidable.

 Undecidable Problems
A problem is undecidable if there is no Turing machine which will
always halt infinite amount of time to give answer as ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

 An undecidable problem has no algorithm to determine the answer for

a given input in yes or no.

 Decidable Problems
A problem is decidable if we can construct a Turing machine which will
halt in finite amount of time for every input and give answer as ‘yes’ or
‘no’. A decidable problem has an algorithm to determine the answer for
a given input.
decidable Problems
Undecidable Problems
 A semi-decidable problem is subset of undecidable problems for
which Turing machine will always halt in finite amount of time for
answer as ‘yes’ and may or may not halt for answer as ‘no’.

 Undecidable language -– A decision problem P is said to be

undecidable if the language L of all yes instances to decision problem
P is not decidable

 or a language is undecidable if it is not decidable.

 An undecidable language maybe a partially decidable language or

something else but not decidable.

 If a language is not even partially decidable , then there exists no

Turing machine for that language.
 Undecidable Problems is non recursive language.

 Recursively language(RE) A recursive language is a formal language

for which there exists a Turning Machine that, when presented with any
finite input string, halts and accepts if the string is in the language,
and halts and rejects otherwise.

 Recursively enumerable language(REL) – A language ‘L’ is said to be a

recursively enumerable language if there exists a Turing machine which
will accept (and therefore halt) for all the input strings which are in ‘L’
but may or may not halt for all input strings which are not in ‘L’.

 By definition , all REC languages are also RE languages but not all RE
languages are REC languages.
Examples
 These are few important Undecidable Problems:

 Whether a CFG generates all the strings or not?

As a CFG generates infinite strings, we can’t ever reach up to the last
string and hence it is Undecidable.

 Whether two CFG L and M equal?

Since we cannot determine all the strings of any CFG, we can predict that
two CFG are equal or not.

 Ambiguity of CFG?
There exist no algorithm which can check whether for the ambiguity of
a CFL. We can only check if any particular string of the CFL generates
two different parse trees then the CFL is ambiguous.
Is it possible to convert a given ambiguous CFG into corresponding non-
ambiguous CFL?
Example…

 It is also an Undecidable Problem as there doesn’t exist any algorithm

for the conversion of an ambiguous CFL to non-ambiguous CFL.

 Is a language Learning which is a CFL, regular?

This is an Undecidable Problem as we can not find from the production
rules of the CFL whether it is regular or not.

Some more Undecidable Problems related to Turing machine:

 Membership problem of a Turing Machine?
 Finiteness of a Turing Machine?
 Emptiness of a Turing Machine?
 Table 1: Undecidable and decidable Problems

Un_(Undecidable ) & D_(decidable )Problems

Thank You