Topics in Algorithmic Randomness and Computability Theory

<p>This thesis establishes results in several different areas of computability theory. The first chapter is concerned with algorithmic randomness. A well-known approach to the definition of a random infinite binary sequence is via effective betting strategies. A betting strategy is called integer-valued if it can bet only in integer amounts. We consider integer-valued random sets, which are infinite binary sequences such that no effective integer-valued betting strategy wins arbitrarily much money betting on the bits of the sequence. This is a notion that is much weaker than those normally considered in algorithmic randomness. It is sufficiently weak to allow interesting interactions with topics from classical computability theory, such as genericity and the computably enumerable degrees. We investigate the computational power of the integer-valued random sets in terms of standard notions from computability theory. In the second chapter we extend the technique of forcing with bushy trees. We use this to construct an increasing ѡ-sequence 〈an〉 of Turing degrees which forms an initial segment of the Turing degrees, and such that each an₊₁ is diagonally noncomputable relative to an. This shows that the DNR₀ principle of reverse mathematics does not imply the existence of Turing incomparable degrees. In the final chapter, we introduce a new notion of genericity which we call ѡ-change genericity. This lies in between the well-studied notions of 1- and 2-genericity. We give several results about the computational power required to compute these generics, as well as other results which compare and contrast their behaviour with that of 1-generics.</p>

Maximality in the ⍺-C.A. Degrees

<p>In [4], Downey and Greenberg define the notion of totally ⍺-c.a. for appropriately small ordinals ⍺, and discuss the hierarchy this notion begets on the Turing degrees. The hierarchy is of particular interest because it has already given rise to several natural definability results, and provides a definable antichain in the c.e. degrees. Following on from the work of [4], we solve problems which are left open in the aforementioned relating to this hierarchy. Our proofs are all constructive, using strategy trees to build c.e. sets, usually with some form of permitting. We identify levels of the hierarchy where there is absolutely no collapse above any totally ⍺-c.a. c.e. degree, and construct, for every ⍺ ≼ ε0, both a totally ⍺-c.a. c.e. minimal cover and a chain of totally ⍺-c.a. c.e. degrees cofinal in the totally ⍺-c.a. c.e. degrees in the cone above the chain's least member.</p>

Topics in Algorithmic Randomness and Computability Theory

<p>This thesis establishes results in several different areas of computability theory. The first chapter is concerned with algorithmic randomness. A well-known approach to the definition of a random infinite binary sequence is via effective betting strategies. A betting strategy is called integer-valued if it can bet only in integer amounts. We consider integer-valued random sets, which are infinite binary sequences such that no effective integer-valued betting strategy wins arbitrarily much money betting on the bits of the sequence. This is a notion that is much weaker than those normally considered in algorithmic randomness. It is sufficiently weak to allow interesting interactions with topics from classical computability theory, such as genericity and the computably enumerable degrees. We investigate the computational power of the integer-valued random sets in terms of standard notions from computability theory. In the second chapter we extend the technique of forcing with bushy trees. We use this to construct an increasing ѡ-sequence 〈an〉 of Turing degrees which forms an initial segment of the Turing degrees, and such that each an₊₁ is diagonally noncomputable relative to an. This shows that the DNR₀ principle of reverse mathematics does not imply the existence of Turing incomparable degrees. In the final chapter, we introduce a new notion of genericity which we call ѡ-change genericity. This lies in between the well-studied notions of 1- and 2-genericity. We give several results about the computational power required to compute these generics, as well as other results which compare and contrast their behaviour with that of 1-generics.</p>

Maximality in the ⍺-C.A. Degrees

<p>In [4], Downey and Greenberg define the notion of totally ⍺-c.a. for appropriately small ordinals ⍺, and discuss the hierarchy this notion begets on the Turing degrees. The hierarchy is of particular interest because it has already given rise to several natural definability results, and provides a definable antichain in the c.e. degrees. Following on from the work of [4], we solve problems which are left open in the aforementioned relating to this hierarchy. Our proofs are all constructive, using strategy trees to build c.e. sets, usually with some form of permitting. We identify levels of the hierarchy where there is absolutely no collapse above any totally ⍺-c.a. c.e. degree, and construct, for every ⍺ ≼ ε0, both a totally ⍺-c.a. c.e. minimal cover and a chain of totally ⍺-c.a. c.e. degrees cofinal in the totally ⍺-c.a. c.e. degrees in the cone above the chain's least member.</p>

Hierarchy of Computably Enumerable Degrees II

A transfinite hierarchy of Turing degrees of c.e.\ sets has been used to calibrate the dynamics of families of constructions in computability theory, and yields natural definability results. We review the main results of the area, and discuss splittings of c.e.\ degrees, and finding maximal degrees in upper cones.

Collapse in a Transfinite Hierarchy of Turing Degrees

<p>In [2], Downey and Greenberg use the ordinals below ε0 to bound the number of mind-changes of computable approximations. This gives rise to a new transfinite hierarchy in the c.e. degrees; the totally α-c.a. degrees. This hierarchy is significant because it unifies the combinatorics of many constructions as well as giving natural definability results in the c.e. Turing degrees. We study the structure of this hierarchy; in particular we investigate collapse in upper cones. We give a proof in which we build a c.e. set using a strategy tree to show there is no uniform way to find a maximal totally ω^2-c.a. degree above a given totally ω-c.a. degree. Then we discuss extensions of this result.</p>

Collapse in a Transfinite Hierarchy of Turing Degrees

<p>In [2], Downey and Greenberg use the ordinals below ε0 to bound the number of mind-changes of computable approximations. This gives rise to a new transfinite hierarchy in the c.e. degrees; the totally α-c.a. degrees. This hierarchy is significant because it unifies the combinatorics of many constructions as well as giving natural definability results in the c.e. Turing degrees. We study the structure of this hierarchy; in particular we investigate collapse in upper cones. We give a proof in which we build a c.e. set using a strategy tree to show there is no uniform way to find a maximal totally ω^2-c.a. degree above a given totally ω-c.a. degree. Then we discuss extensions of this result.</p>

Intrinsic density, asymptotic computability, and stochasticity

There are many computational problems which are generally “easy” to solve but have certain rare examples which are much more difficult to solve. One approach to studying these problems is to ignore the difficult edge cases. Asymptotic computability is one of the formal tools that uses this approach to study these problems. Asymptotically computable sets can be thought of as almost computable sets, however every set is computationally equivalent to an almost computable set. Intrinsic density was introduced as a way to get around this unsettling fact, and which will be our main focus.Of particular interest for the first half of this dissertation are the intrinsically small sets, the sets of intrinsic density $0$ . While the bulk of the existing work concerning intrinsic density was focused on these sets, there were still many questions left unanswered. The first half of this dissertation answers some of these questions. We proved some useful closure properties for the intrinsically small sets and applied them to prove separations for the intrinsic variants of asymptotic computability. We also completely separated hyperimmunity and intrinsic smallness in the Turing degrees and resolved some open questions regarding the relativization of intrinsic density.For the second half of this dissertation, we turned our attention to the study of intermediate intrinsic density. We developed a calculus using noncomputable coding operations to construct examples of sets with intermediate intrinsic density. For almost all $r\in (0,1)$ , this construction yielded the first known example of a set with intrinsic density r which cannot compute a set random with respect to the r-Bernoulli measure. Motivated by the fact that intrinsic density coincides with the notion of injection stochasticity, we applied these techniques to study the structure of the more well-known notion of MWC-stochasticity.Abstract prepared by Justin Miller.E-mail: [email protected]: https://curate.nd.edu/show/6t053f4938w

On Transfinite Levels of the Ershov Hierarchy

In this thesis, we study Turing degrees in the context of classical recursion theory. What we are interested in is the partially ordered structures $\mathcal {D}_{\alpha }$ for ordinals $\alpha <\omega ^2$ and $\mathcal {D}_{a}$ for notations $a\in \mathcal {O}$ with $|a|_{o}\geq \omega ^2$ .The dissertation is motivated by the $\Sigma _{1}$ -elementary substructure problem: Can one structure in the following structures $\mathcal {R}\subsetneqq \mathcal {D}_{2}\subsetneqq \dots \subsetneqq \mathcal {D}_{\omega }\subsetneqq \mathcal {D}_{\omega +1}\subsetneqq \dots \subsetneqq \mathcal {D(\leq \textbf {0}')}$ be a $\Sigma _{1}$ -elementary substructure of another? For finite levels of the Ershov hierarchy, Cai, Shore, and Slaman [Journal of Mathematical Logic, vol. 12 (2012), p. 1250005] showed that $\mathcal {D}_{n}\npreceq _{1}\mathcal {D}_{m}$ for any $n < m$ . We consider the problem for transfinite levels of the Ershov hierarchy and show that $\mathcal {D}_{\omega }\npreceq _{1}\mathcal {D}_{\omega +1}$ . The techniques in Chapters 2 and 3 are motivated by two remarkable theorems, Sacks Density Theorem and the d.r.e. Nondensity Theorem.In Chapter 1, we first briefly review the background of the research areas involved in this thesis, and then review some basic definitions and classical theorems. We also summarize our results in Chapter 2 to Chapter 4. In Chapter 2, we show that for any $\omega $ -r.e. set D and r.e. set B with $D<_{T}B$ , there is an $\omega +1$ -r.e. set A such that $D<_{T}A<_{T}B$ . In Chapter 3, we show that for some notation a with $|a|_{o}=\omega ^{2}$ , there is an incomplete $\omega +1$ -r.e. set A such that there are no a-r.e. sets U with $A<_{T}U<_{T}K$ . In Chapter 4, we generalize above results to higher levels (up to $\varepsilon _{0}$ ). We investigate Lachlan sets and minimal degrees on transfinite levels and show that for any notation a, there exists a $\Delta ^{0}_{2}$ -set A such that A is of minimal degree and $A\not \equiv _T U$ for all a-r.e. sets U.Abstract prepared by Cheng Peng.E-mail: [email protected]

Results on Martin’s Conjecture

Martin’s conjecture is an attempt to classify the behavior of all definable functions on the Turing degrees under strong set theoretic hypotheses. Very roughly it says that every such function is either eventually constant, eventually equal to the identity function or eventually equal to a transfinite iterate of the Turing jump. It is typically divided into two parts: the first part states that every function is either eventually constant or eventually above the identity function and the second part states that every function which is above the identity is eventually equal to a transfinite iterate of the jump. If true, it would provide an explanation for the unique role of the Turing jump in computability theory and rule out many types of constructions on the Turing degrees.In this thesis, we will introduce a few tools which we use to prove several cases of Martin’s conjecture. It turns out that both these tools and these results on Martin’s conjecture have some interesting consequences both for Martin’s conjecture and for a few related topics.The main tool that we introduce is a basis theorem for perfect sets, improving a theorem due to Groszek and Slaman. We also introduce a general framework for proving certain special cases of Martin’s conjecture which unifies a few pre-existing proofs. We will use these tools to prove three main results about Martin’s conjecture: that it holds for regressive functions on the hyperarithmetic degrees (answering a question of Slaman and Steel), that part 1 holds for order preserving functions on the Turing degrees, and that part 1 holds for a class of functions that we introduce, called measure preserving functions.This last result has several interesting consequences for the study of Martin’s conjecture. In particular, it shows that part 1 of Martin’s conjecture is equivalent to a statement about the Rudin-Keisler order on ultrafilters on the Turing degrees. This suggests several possible strategies for working on part 1 of Martin’s conjecture, which we will discuss.The basis theorem that we use to prove these results also has some applications outside of Martin’s conjecture. We will use it to prove a few theorems related to Sacks’ question about whether it is provable in $\mathsf {ZFC}$ that every locally countable partial order of size continuum embeds into the Turing degrees. We will show that in a certain extension of $\mathsf {ZF}$ (which is incompatible with $\mathsf {ZFC}$ ), this holds for all partial orders of height two, but not for all partial orders of height three. Our proof also yields an analogous result for Borel partial orders and Borel embeddings in $\mathsf {ZF}$ , which shows that the Borel version of Sacks’ question has a negative answer.We will end the thesis with a list of open questions related to Martin’s conjecture, which we hope will stimulate further research.Abstract prepared by Patrick Lutz.E-mail: [email protected]