How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
FALSE: every countable language is decidable
Statement
Every countable language is decidable.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The unary alphabet .
By Finite, countably infinite, countable, uncountable, a language is countable when it is finite or countably infinite.
By Turing machines admit an effective enumeration, the coded deterministic one-tape Turing machines can be effectively listed.
By Decidable and recognizable languages, a decider for a language must halt on every input and give the correct membership answer.
By A fixed effective binary encoding of deterministic one-tape Turing machines, a coded machine has input alphabet , so every coded machine with can read every unary word as a legal input.
Any deterministic one-tape decider over the unary alphabet can be put in the normalized coded form by relabelling its finite state and tape alphabets, adding unreachable designated states if necessary, and filling any omitted transition entries with a rejecting transition. This preserves its behavior on unary inputs.
Refutation
The set is countable by length, so write its elements as for . Filter the effective list from [L2] by keeping only the coded machines whose input-alphabet parameter satisfies ; by [L4], this gives an effective enumeration of all coded deterministic one-tape machines that can read every unary word. Let . By [L1], the language is countable because it is a subset of the countable set .
Suppose a decider decides . By [F1], an equivalent coded decider occurs as some in the filtered enumeration. If , then step 1.1 says that does not accept , contradicting the requirement that a decider for accept members. If , then step 1.1 says that accepts , contradicting the requirement that a decider reject nonmembers.
Thus no decider decides the countable language , so the statement is false.
Depends on
Used by
Nothing in the library uses this result yet.
Dependency tree · two levels
19 results within two dependency steps of this one, each drawn at its shortest distance from it. An arrow runs from a result to what uses it, so the chart reads left to right and ends at this result, which carries a heavier outline. Every node is a link to that result. Click elsewhere on the chart to enlarge it.
Sources
- John Watrous, Introduction to the Theory of Computing, Lecture 17: More undecidable languages; reductions (standard reference, not scraped)
- Jean Gallier and Jocelyn Quaintance, Introduction to the Theory of Computation: Some Notes for CIS511 (standard reference, not scraped)