is a co-recursively enumerable language, is not a recursively enumerable language, and is not a decidable language. The stipulated order on halting times includes .
First, failure has a finite witness. For valid machine descriptions,
Indeed, a strict inequality forces the first halting time to be finite. The second can be either a larger finite time or infinity. Whether the displayed condition holds for fixed is decidable by a finite simulation, including the initial configurations when .
Enumerate all pairs and perform these finite tests by dovetailing, accepting the complement of a set of on finding a witness. Equivalently, at stage , inspect all inputs of length at most through transitions. A genuine violation eventually appears; if there is no violation, the procedure never accepts. Malformed descriptions or differing input alphabets can be recognized and accepted as nonmembers immediately. Thus the complement is a recursively enumerable language, proving that is a co-recursively enumerable language.
For non-enumerability, use the standard result that the complement of a set of the halting problem
is not a recursively enumerable language. Given , effectively construct two Turing machines over the same fixed input alphabet. On every input , let ignore and simulate on the fixed word , halting precisely when that simulation halts. Let loop forever on every input.
If does not halt on , both halting times are infinity for every , so the pair belongs to . If halts on , the first halting time is finite while the second is infinity, so the pair does not belong to . Therefore
This is a many-one reduction from non-halting to the pointwise running-time domination problem. Were a recursively enumerable language, constructing the pair and running its recognizer would recognize non-halting, contradicting the stated result. Hence is not a recursively enumerable language. Since every decidable language is a recursively enumerable language, is also undecidable.
Give a nonhalting Turing machine computation halting time infinity. The formal language of pairs satisfying the displayed inequality is a co-recursively enumerable language but is not a recursively enumerable language. A violation has a finite witness: has halted on some input after moves while has not halted by that time. For the other direction, reduce non-halting by making simulate a fixed computation on every input and making run forever. The pair satisfies domination exactly when the fixed computation never halts. The convention is essential to this many-one reduction.