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I was wondering how to prove that a language $C$ is Turing-recognizable iff a decidable language $D$ exists such that $C = \{x \mid \exists y \;(\langle x, y\rangle \in D)\}$.

I do not know how to prove this kind of questions, is there any help to solve this problem or any problem as this kind?

John L.
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Optimistic
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1 Answers1

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There are two directions here. One is trivial: if $C$ is indeed of the above form, then it is clearly recognizable: given $x$ just run $D$ on all possible $y$'s in a dovetailing manner (see, e.g., here, or search in this site).

The other direction is less obvious, but also not too difficult: Assume that $C$ is recognizable. Then, there exists a machine that halts and accepts any $x\in C$. Thus, you can write the sequence of configurations of $M$ on input $x$, and this sequence is finite! This sequence will be the $y$ that exists if $x$ is in the language. You should be able to complete the details from here.

Ran G.
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