The Turing Universe in the Context of Enumeration Reducibility
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The Turing universe in the context of enumeration reducibility Mariya I. Soskova ? Sofia University and University of California, Berkeley A fundamental goal of computability theory is to understand the way that objects relate to each other in terms of their information content. We wish to understand the relative information content between sets of natural numbers, how one subset of the natural numbers Y can be used to specify another one X. This specification can be computational, or arithmetic, or even by the application of a countable sequence of Borel operations. Each notion in the spectrum gives rise to a different model of relative computability. Which of these models best reflects the real world computation is under question. The most widely used and studied model is the one based on computation: a set of natural numbers A is Turing reducible to set of natural numbers B if there is an effective procedure, by which given a natural number n and using the answers to finitely many membership questions to the oracle B we can correctly decide whether or not n is a member of A. By identifying sets that can be reduced to each other we obtain the partial order of the Turing degrees. Computable sets have least information content and form the least Turing degree 0T . There is a natural way to combine the information content of two sets of natural numbers, A and B are combined into A⊕B = f2n j n 2 Ag[f2n + 1 j n 2 Bg, so that every pair of Turing degrees has a least upper bound. Finally, using a relativization of the halting problem, for every Turing degree dT (A) we can find a degree which is strictly more complex, namely dT (KA), where KA is the halting set, relativized to A, which we call the jump of the Turing degree dT (A), and denote 0 by dT (A) . Thus the structure of the Turing degrees is an upper semi-lattice 0 with least element and jump operation: DT = (DT ; ≤T ; 0T ; _; ). In this article we will examine the structure of the Turing degrees in the context, provided by a slightly weaker form of reducibility, based on the notion of enumeration rather than computation. This reducibility was introduced by Friedberg and Rogers [6] in 1959. A set of natural numbers A is enumeration reducible to a set of natural numbers B, if we can effectively transform any enumeration of the set B into an enumeration of the set A. There is a very close relationship between Turing reducibility and enumeration reducibility. To see this recall that an equivalent way of saying that A ≤T B is to say that both A and the complement of A can be enumerated using oracle B, or in other words A ⊕ A is computably enumerable in B. Going deeper into the definition of c.e. in, we can say that there is a c.e. set W , whose members are pairs hn; ui ? Supported by a BNSF grant No. DMU 03/07/12.12.2011, by Sofia University Science Fund and by a Marie Curie international outgoing fellowship STRIDE (298471) within the 7th European Community Framework Programme of a natural number and a code for a finite set Du, so that A ⊕ A can be represented as the set n j 9u(hn; ui 2 W & Du ⊆ B ⊕ B) . In this definition the oracle set B ⊕ B and the reduced set A ⊕ A have a very specific structure: they both contain all of the positive information about a set in their even part and all the negative information about the same set in their odd part. If we drop this requirement on the structure of the reduced set, we obtain a definition of the relation c.e. in. If we consider a more general form of this definition, by dropping the structural requirements on both the oracle and reduced set, we obtain a definition of enumeration reducibility. Definition 1. Let A and B be sets of natural numbers. A ≤e B if and only if there is a c.e. set W , such that A = W (B) = fx j 9u(hx; ui 2 W ^ Du ⊆ B)g. The set W will be called an enumeration operator. From this analysis we immediately obtain the following relationship: Proposition 1. Let A and B be sets of natural numbers. 1. A is c.e. in B if and only if A ≤e B ⊕ B. 2. A ≤T B if and only if A ⊕ A ≤e B ⊕ B. Enumeration reducibility carries its own structure. By identifying sets that are enumeration reducible to each other, i.e. enumeration equivalent, we obtain the set of enumeration degrees De. This is a partial order, where de(A) ≤e de(B) if and only if A ≤e B. The least element 0e consists of all computably enumerable sets. The way in which we obtained a least upper bound for Turing degrees, gives a least upper bound in the enumeration degrees, de(A ⊕ B) = de(A) _ de(B). Thus De = (De; ≤e; 0e; _) is as well an upper semi-lattice. Proposition 1 yields a standard embedding ι : DT ! De of the Turing degrees into the enumeration degrees, which preserves the order and the least upper bound. This embedding is defined by ι(dT (A)) = de(A ⊕ A). The image of the Turing degrees under this embedding is the set T OT of total enumera- tion degrees. The substructure T OT of the total enumeration degrees plays a central role in the study of the enumeration degrees. Selman [21] showed that enumeration reducibility can be characterized by the following: Theorem 1. Let A; B ⊆ !. A ≤e B if and only if fX j B is c.e. in Xg ⊆ fX j A is c.e. in Xg : Translated in terms of enumeration reducibility using the first part of Proposition 1, this means that every enumeration degree is entirely characterized by the set of total degrees above it. In particular the set of total enumeration degrees is an automorphism base for the structure of the enumeration degrees. We are still missing one ingredient for a complete analogy between the two structures: a jump operation, that agrees with the Turing jump under the stan- dard embedding. The candidate for an analog of the halting set, which first e comes to mind is KA = fhn; ei j n 2 We(A)g. A closer look at this set shows e that this first choice is not satisfactory, as KA is of the same enumeration degree as A. This is not too surprising, in the Turing case the reason that the halting set is not computable comes from the fact that the complement of the halting set diagonalizes against all possible computations. In contrast to the Turing degrees, the enumeration degrees are not closed under complement. This is why, to get a e jump operation, which actually jumps up, we need to use the complement of KA. 0 e e Thus we define A = KA ⊕ KA. We will call sets A, such that A ≡e A ⊕ A, total sets. Total sets are always members of total degrees. Examples of total sets are graphs of total functions, from where the term total originates, and as we just saw - jumps of sets, by definition. In the reverse direction we have the following jump inversion theorem by Soskov [28]. Theorem 2. For every enumeration degree x there exists a total enumeration 0 0 degree a, such that x ≤e a and x = a . It is not hard to see that this definition of the enumeration jump meets our requirements - it agrees with the Turing jump under the standard embedding ι. Thus the structure of the enumeration degrees provides a richer context in which we can study the structure of the Turing degrees. In this article we will argue that there are cases in which this approach is useful, shedding light on phenomena that can be observed, but not well explained by viewing the structure of the Turing degrees alone. 1 Computable model theory Our first example comes from a theorem by Coles, Downey and Slaman [3]. For every set of natural numbers A, consider the set C(A) = fX j A is c.e. in Xg. It follows from a result by Richter [19] that sets of this form do not always have a member of least Turing degree. Coles, Downey and Slaman show that if you instead look at C(A)0 = fX0 j A is c.e. in Xg, then this set always has a member of least Turing degree. Theorem 3. For every sets A the set: C(A)0 = fX0 j A is c.e. in Xg has a member of least degree. They call this degree the least jump enumeration of A. The proof constructs this least jump enumeration using forcing with finite conditions. The motivation for this result comes from computable model theory, and the notion of degree spectrum, used to characterize different structures. Fix a countable relational structure A = (N;R1 :::Rk). The degree spectrum of A, denoted by DST (A), is the set of Turing degrees of the diagrams of structures ∼ B = A. If DST (A) has a least member, it is the (Turing) degree of A. Sometimes the spectrum of a structure does not behave nicely, and it is useful and more informative to consider the jump spectrum of a structure. The jump spectrum 0 0 0 of A is DST (A) = fd j d 2 DST (A)g. If DST (A) has a least member, it is the (Turing) jump degree of A.