Turing Machines Connected to the Undecidability of the Halting Problem

Abstract

The problem of finding a Turing machine with undecidable halting problem whose program contains the smallest number of instructions is well known. Obviously, such a machine must satisfy the following condition: by deleting even a single instruction from its program, we get a machine with decidable halting problem. In this paper, Turing machines with undecidable halting problem satisfying this condition are called connected. We obtain a number of general properties of such machines and deduce their simplest corollaries concerning the minimal machine with undecidable halting problem.