Consider the following problems:

(i) Whether a finite automaton halts on all inputs?

(ii) Whether a given Context Free Language is Regular?

(iii) Whether a Turing Machine computes the product of two numbers?

Which one of the following is correct?

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UGC NET Computer Science (Paper 2) Dec 2018 Paper
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  1. Only (ii) and (iii) are undecidable problems
  2. (i), (ii) and (iii) are undecidable problems
  3. Only (i) and (ii) are undecidable problems
  4. Only (i) and (iii) are undecidable problems

Answer (Detailed Solution Below)

Option 1 : Only (ii) and (iii) are undecidable problems
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Detailed Solution

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Statement i: Decidable

A language is decidable when there is a machine which halts for every string in that language and goes to non-final state for string not in the language. A finite automaton is a special case of a Turing machine which halts on all inputs that are in the language, so it is decidable.

Statement ii: Undecidable

Regular property of context free languages is undecidable.  This can be proved by taking regular language as Σ*. Assume both G and R as part of input problem. For any family of languages, whether it is equal to other language is decidable if both L1 and L2 are subset of each other.

Statement iii: Undecidable

Turing machine is for recursive enumerable languages (for type 0 problems). Type 0 problems are undecidable. If we do not know about the Turing machine, it could possible that result for any two numbers will go into infinite loop and never halt. If it happens, then problem is undecidable.
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