Submonoids and rational subsets of groups with infinitely many ends. (Q606649)

Algorithmic problems like the word problem or the generalized word problem which is also known as the subgroup membership problem (that asks whether a given group element belongs to a given finitely generated subgroup) play important roles in algebra. The paper under review is concerned with the membership problem and the authors show that the submonoid membership and rational subset membership problems for a finitely generated group with two or more ends are recursively equivalent. Before giving the result(s), the authors prove some supporting results about groups acting on trees, and these results allow them to reduce the main result to a particular type of HNN extension.