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patternMinor

Decidability of determining whether a context-free grammar generates all strings in 1*

Submitted by: @import:stackexchange-cs··
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generatesdeterminingfreeallstringsgrammardecidabilitycontextwhether

Problem

How could I prove that the following language is decidable?

$\{\langle G\rangle \mid G\ \text{is a CFG over}\ \{0,1\}\ \text{and}\ 1^* \subseteq L(G)\}$

P.S.
It's the problem 4.15 of the third edition of the "Introduction to the Theory of Computation" by Michael Sipser.

Solution

You can find the solutions to the exercises of that book here. For completeness of the answer, I rewrite the solution (with some more details) here.

Let $p$ be an upper bound of the pumping length of $G$, you only need to check whether $1^0, 1^1,\ldots,1^{p+p!} \in G$. If not, we can certainly reject $\langle G\rangle$. Otherwise, applying pumping lemma on $1^k$ ($p\le k\le p + p!$), we can conclude that there exist substrings $u,v,w,x,y$ such that

  • $1^k=uvwxy$, which means $u,v,w,x,y$ contain only 1s,



  • $|vwx|\le \text{pumping length} \le p$,



  • $|vx|\ge1$ and



  • $uv^nwx^ny\in G$, i.e. $1^{|uwy|+n|vx|}=1^{k+(n-1)|vx|}\in G$, for all $n\ge 0$, which means $1^{k+n(p!)}\in G$ for all $n\ge0$.



Note $\{1^{k+n(p!)}\mid n\ge0, p\le k\le p + p!\}$ covers all $1^m$ for large $m$, so $1^0, 1^1,\ldots,1^{p+p!} \in G$ indeed implies $1^*\subseteq G$.

Context

StackExchange Computer Science Q#92738, answer score: 2

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