Stephen G. Simpson
Pennsylvania State University
First draft: September 15, 2006
This draft: April 28, 2008
http://www.math.psu.edu/simpson/
AMS Subject Classifications: 03D28, 03D30, 03D80, 03D25, 68Q30.
This research was partially supported by NSF grant DMS-0600823.
Accepted April 24, 2007 for Mathematical Logic Quarterly.
Mathematical Logic Quarterly, 53, 2007, pp. 483-492.
In our previous papers
[3,31,34,32,7] we
studied the lattice
of degrees of unsolvability of mass problems
associated with nonempty
subsets of
. We showed
that
contains many specific, natural degrees in addition to
and
, the top and bottom elements of
. We showed
that many specific, natural degrees in
arise from foundationally
interesting topics such as reverse mathematics, algorithmic
randomness, computational complexity, hyperarithmeticity, and
subrecursive hierarchies from Gentzen-style proof theory.
The purpose of the present paper is to exhibit and discuss some
relatively new examples of specific, natural degrees in
. The
new examples arise from almost everywhere domination, a concept
which was originally introduced by Dobrinen/Simpson [9]. Let
be a Turing oracle. We say that
is almost everywhere
dominating if, for all
except a set of measure
,
each function computable from
is dominated by some function
computable from
. It is known [9] that almost everywhere
domination is closely related to the reverse mathematics of measure
theory.
In order to succinctly state our results, let
is Martin-Löf random
and
is
almost everywhere dominating
. For
we write
and
and
the
intersection of
and
. With these conventions, let
,
,
be the respective degrees of unsolvability of the
mass problems associated with
,
,
. Trivially
. Our main
results may be summarized by saying that the degrees
,
,
belong
to
and
Historically, there has been a great deal of interest in the
semilattice of recursively enumerable Turing degrees. Therefore, it
seems desirable to examine the relationships between recursively
enumerable Turing degrees and the various specific, natural degrees in
. In order to state our results, let us temporarily identify
each recursively enumerable Turing degree
with its image in
under the natural one-to-one embedding
given in [34, Theorem 5.5]. In
particular, we identify
and
, the top and bottom
recursively enumerable Turing degrees, with
and
, the top
and bottom degrees in
. In our papers [31,34]
written in 2004, we remarked that all of the specific, natural degrees
in
which were known at that time are incomparable with all
recursively enumerable Turing degrees except
and
. In
this respect it turns out that our new examples of specific, natural
degrees in
behave somewhat differently from the old ones.
Namely, although
is again incomparable with all
recursively enumerable Turing degrees except
and
, this
turns out not to be the case for
and
. See Theorems 3.1 and 3.2
below.
Our work in this paper owes much to conversations with Bjørn
Kjos-Hanssen, Antonín Kucera, and Joseph S. Miller. In
particular, the fact that
belongs to
was
already implicit in Kjos-Hanssen [18], and Miller
corrected an error in one of our early proofs of the inequality
.
The reader who is familiar with the basics of recursion theory will
find that this paper is largely self-contained. If
is an
expression which may or may not denote a natural number, we write
to mean that
is defined (i.e.,
denotes a
natural number), otherwise
. If
and
are two
such expressions, we write
to mean that
and
are both defined and equal, or both undefined. Throughout this
paper, a convenient background reference is our recent paper
[33], which includes a fairly thorough exposition of almost
everywhere domination and Martin-Löf randomness.
The purpose of this section is to prove our mass problem inequalities
in
. The proofs use some recent theorems of
Cholak/Greenberg/Miller, Kjos-Hanssen, Hirschfeldt/Miller, Nies, and
Stephan concerning almost everywhere domination and Martin-Löf
randomness. In order to make this paper more self-contained, we
exposit the proofs of the theorems of Hirschfeldt/Miller, Nies, and
Stephan respectively in Sections 4, 5,
6 below.
Our notion of reducibility for decision problems is standard. Given
, we say that
is Turing reducible to
,
abbreviated
, if
is computable using
as an oracle. A
Turing degree is an equivalence class of elements of
under mutual Turing reducibility. The Turing degree of
is denoted
.
Our notion of reducibility for mass problems is as follows. Given
, we say that
is weakly reducible to
, abbreviated
, if for all
there exists
such that
is Turing reducible to
. A weak degree is an
equivalence class of subsets of
under mutual weak
reducibility. The weak degree of
is denoted
. Weak
degrees have sometimes been known as Muchnik degrees
[23].
Note that for
and
we have
and
. Note also that for
we have
if and
only if
. Here
denotes the singleton set
whose only element is
. Therefore, the Turing degree
is sometimes identified with the weak degree
.
Proof.An important tool in the study of
is the Embedding Lemma
[34, Lemma 3.3], [32, Lemma 4]. The Embedding Lemma
says: For any
where
is
, we have
. Therefore, in order to prove Theorem
2.2, it suffices to show that
and
are
.
After Dobrinen/Simpson [9], the concept of almost
everywhere domination was subsequently explored by
Binns/Kjos-Hanssen/Lerman/Solomon [2],
Cholak/Greenberg/Miller [5], Kjos-Hanssen
[18], Kjos-Hanssen/Miller/Solomon [19], and
Simpson [33]. We now know [18,19] that
is almost everywhere dominating if and only if
.
Here
denotes the Halting Problem, and
denotes
-reducibility:
if and only if
if
is random relative to
, then
is random relative
to
. Moreover, as shown in [19],
-reducibility
is equivalent to
-reducibility:
if and only
if
for all
. Here
denotes the prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity of
relative to
a Turing oracle
. The concepts of
-reducibility and
-reducibility were originally introduced by Nies [24, Section
8]. A convenient reference for these results is Simpson
[33].
One way to see that
is
is to use the
characterization in terms of
-reducibility. We know that
if and only if
, i.e.,
, i.e.,
. But
if and only if
and
. Here
is
a universal prefix-free oracle machine. The last satement is
, so
is
. The fact that
is
has previously been noted by Kjos-Hanssen
[18] and Kjos-Hanssen/Miller/Solomon [19].
See also [33, Corollary 5.9].
It remains to show that
is
. In fact,
is
in view of the existence of a universal Martin-Löf
test. See for instance [20] or
[31, Theorem 8.3] or [33, Theorem 3.2]. This
completes the proof of Theorem 2.2.![]()
Proof.Trivially
, hence
. Recall
from [31,34] that
where
Next we prove
. We use the
forcing construction of Cholak/Greenberg/Miller [5]
referring to
-genericity.
It remains to prove
. We use the following
results of Nies 2006 and Stephan 2002.
This completes the proof of Theorem 2.3.![]()
In this section we discuss the relationship between the weak degrees
,
,
and the recursively enumerable Turing
degrees. Recall from [34, Theorem 5.5] that there is a
natural one-to-one embedding of the recursively enumerable Turing
degrees into
given by
.
Proof.Let
where
is recursively enumerable and
. Since
is nonrecursive, we have
by Lemma 2.7, hence
by Lemmas 2.5 and
2.6, hence
by
Lemma 2.9. From this it follows trivially that
. In other words,
. On the other hand, since
is recursively enumerable and not Turing complete, we have
by the Arslanov Completeness Criterion
[14], hence
by Lemmas
2.5 and 2.6. From this it follows
trivially that
. In
other words,
. This
completes the proof.![]()
Proof.By Lemma 2.8 due to Hirschfeldt and Miller, let
be
recursively enumerable such that
. By
Simpson [33, Example 6.8] or Cholak/Greenberg/Miller
[5, Theorem 2.1], let
be recursively enumerable
and almost everywhere dominating. Let
and
. Clearly
and
and
and
. By Theorems 2.3 and
3.1 it follows that
and
.![]()
In this section we exposit the proof of the following theorem of Hirschfeldt and Miller 2006, generalizing a much earlier theorem of Kucera [21].
Proof.We follow the writeup of Nies [25, Theorem 5.6].
We first prove the theorem for
sets. Let
be
of measure
. Write
where
is uniformly
and
.
The construction of
is as follows. At stage
, for each
such that
, look for
such
that
and
and put the least such
into
.
Clearly
is recursively enumerable. Moreover, for each
, at
most one
gets into
for the sake of
, and for this
we have
. Hence
has at most
members
. Thus
is infinite.
We claim that if
is infinite then
. To
see this, fix
so large that
and
.
Let
be such that
. We have
,
so by construction
, Q.E.D.
It follows from the previous claim that
is nonrecursive.
Indeed,
is simple in the sense of Post (compare Rogers
[27, Section 8.1]).
We claim that
for all random
. To see this, note
that by construction
Suppose now that
is
of measure
. Write
where
is uniformly
. Write
where
is uniformly
and
for each
. This implies that
, so we can build
as before
replacing
by
. The
construction insures that
The following corollary is originally due to Kucera [21].
Proof.Let
and apply Theorem 4.1.![]()
The following lemma is well known.
Proof.It suffices to show that
whenever
is
random relative to
. (Generalizations of this result are in
Kautz's thesis [17, Theorem III.2.1].) Consider the
sets
. Obviously these sets are
uniformly
. Let
least
such that
. Note that
. Thus
is uniformly
and these
sets form a Solovay test relative to
. Now assume that
is
random relative to
. By Solovay's Lemma relative to
, we
have
for all but finitely many
. In other words, for all but finitely many
,
if
and only if
. Since
, it follows that
. This completes the proof.![]()
Proof.By Theorem 4.1 with
, it suffices to show that
is
and of measure
. We have seen in the
proof of Theorem 2.2 that
is
. To
show that
, recall from [19] and
[33, Section 8] that
.
Thus
is disjoint from the intersection of two sets:
and
. The
first set is of measure
by Lemma 4.4, and the second
set is of measure
by Lemma 2.9. This completes the
proof.![]()
In this section we present a new proof of a theorem of Nies
[26, Theorem VI.18] refining the Jockusch/Shore
Pseudojump Inversion Theorem [15, Theorem 2.1]. By a
pseudojump operator we mean an operator
given by
for all
.
Proof.Our proof is based on a sketch given by Kucera at an American Institute of Mathematics workshop on algorithmic randomness, August 7-11, 2006. The idea is to combine the proofs of the Pseudojump Inversion Theorem and the Kucera/Gács Theorem.
Let us write
.
Note that
,
is a standard, recursive
enumeration of all
subsets of
. Given a
set
, an index of
is any
integer
such that
. Let us say that a
set
is rich if
and there exists a
recursive function
such that for all
, if
then
.
We claim that every
set
of positive
measure includes a
set which is rich. To see this, let
be such that
. Write
and
note that
,
is a uniformly recursive
descending sequence of clopen sets such that
.
Define a recursive ascending sequence of clopen sets
,
as follows. Begin with
. Given
define
where the union is taken over all
such that
. Finally let
where
. Clearly
is
. Moreover
, hence
. If
then for all
we have
, hence
. Thus
is rich via
. This proves our claim.
To prove the theorem, let
be
of
positive measure. By our claim, we may safely assume that
is
rich. Under this assumption we shall carry out the proof of the
Pseudojump Inversion Theorem ``within
'' to produce
with
the desired properties.
For strings
let us write
. For each string
we define a string
and
a nonempty
set
. Begin
with
and
.
Assume inductively that
and
have already been
defined.
In order to control the pseudojump
, define a string
and a nonempty
set
as follows. Let
. If
and
, let
and let
. Otherwise, consider the least
such that
and
, and let
and
. Thus
``decides'' whether
or not.
Because
is rich, given an index of
we can effectively
find
such that
. But then there are at
least two strings
of length
such that
. Let
and
be the lexicographically leftmost
and rightmost such
. Let
and
.
We have now defined
,
,
,
for
all
. It is straightforward to check that
and
and the indices of
and
are uniformly
computable from
.
Given
let
. Then
if and only if
. Moreover, it is
straightforward to show that
and
and the
indices of
and
are uniformly
computable from each of the Turing oracles
and
and
. From this, the desired conclusions
follow easily.![]()
Proof.In Theorem 5.1 let
be a nonempty
set such
that
is random
.![]()
Proof.By Theorem 5.2, it suffices to produce a psuedojump
operator
such that for all
,
and
is
low-for-random relative to
. Such an operator is obtained by
uniformly relativizing the Kucera/Terwijn [22]
construction of a nonrecursive, recursively enumerable set which is
low-for-random. See also the exposition in Simpson
[33, Section 6].![]()
Proof.This is the special case of Corollary 5.4 in which we
let
.![]()
Proof.This follows from Corollary 5.4 by considering
uncountably many
.![]()
Proof.Corollaries 5.7 and 5.8 are immediate from
Corollaries 5.5 and 5.6 plus the following
fact: If
is low-for-random relative to
then
is almost
everywhere dominating. This fact is due to
Kjos-Hanssen/Miller/Solomon [19]. See also the
exposition in Simpson [33, Section 5].![]()
In this section we exposit the proof of the following theorem of Stephan [35].
Proof.We shall define a recursively bounded, partial recursive function
with the following property: For all random
, if
some total function extending
then
. This suffices
to prove the theorem, because clearly every
computes
a total extension of every recursively bounded, partial recursive
function (see for instance [31, Theorem 4.10]).
Recall that
is a recursively enumerable set. If
let
be undefined for all
. If
, say
, then for each
compute the rational numbers
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