A FINITELY PRESENTED GROUP WITH ALMOST SOLVABLE CONJUGACY PROBLEM

Abstract

The algorithmic unsolvability of the conjugacy problem for finitely presented groups was demonstrated by Novikov in the early 1950s. Various simplifications and alternative proofs were found by later researchers and further questions raised. Recent work by Borovik, Myasnikov and Remeslennikov has considered the question of what proportion of the number of elements of a group (obtained by standard constructions) falls into the realm of unsolvability. In this paper we provide a straightforward construction, as a Britton tower, of a finitely presented group with solvable word problem but unsolvable conjugacy problem of any r.e. (recursively enumerable) Turing degree a. The question of whether two elements are conjugate is bounded truth-table reducible to the question of whether the elements are both conjugate to a single generator of the group. We also define computable normal forms, based on the method of Bokut', that are suitable for the conjugacy problem. We consider (ordered) pairs of normal words U, V for the conjugacy problem whose lengths add to l and show that the proportion of such pairs for which conjugacy is undecidable (in the case a ≠ 0) is strictly less than l2/(2λ - 1)l where λ > 4. The construction is based on modular machines, introduced by Aanderaa and Cohen. For the purposes of this construction it was helpful to extend the notion of configuration to include pairs of m-adic integers. The notion of computation step was also extended and is referred to as s-fold computation where s ∈ ℤ (the usual notion coresponds to s = 1). If gcd (m, s) = 1 then determinism is preserved, i.e., if the modular machine is deterministic then it remains so under the extended notion. Furthermore there is a simple correspondence between s-fold and standard computation in this case. Otherwise computation is non-deterministic and there does not seem to be any straightforward correspondence between s-fold and standard computation.