Show that the language is undecidable

Question

Consider the language

Consider the language Aabb = {< M > | M is a TM, and M accepts abb} a) What is the computational problem that is represented by Aabb? b) Show that Aabb is undecidable.

I tried proving it but didn't know what to do.

Answer 1

You can use Rice's theorem directly and correctly prove the claim by noting that some TMs accept aab, some don't, and acceptance of abb is a semantic property of languages (it has to do only with the strings accepted, not the manner of accepting them). Rice guarantees this language is undecidable.

If you want another kind of proof, consider the following. There's nothing special about the string abb. If this problem is decidable, we'd expect the problem to be decidable for any arbitrary string. If it were decidable for any arbitrary string, we could use dovetailing to decide whether the language of the TM were empty. If we could decide whether the language of a TM were empty, we could take any TM, change all instances of halt-reject to halt-accept, and then decide whether the TM halts on at least one input. Etc. Etc. Basically, you can construct a chain of implications as long as you want but you quickly find known undecidable problems you can reduce to.