English

Coding information into all infinite subsets of a dense set

Logic 2023-08-15 v3 Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

Suppose you have an uncomputable set XX and you want to find a set AA, all of whose infinite subsets compute XX. There are several ways to do this, but all of them seem to produce a set AA which is fairly sparse. We show that this is necessary in the following technical sense: if XX is uncomputable and AA is a set of positive lower density then AA has an infinite subset which does not compute XX. We also prove an analogous result for PA degree: if XX is uncomputable and AA is a set of positive lower density then AA has an infinite subset which is not of PA degree. We will show that these theorems are sharp in certain senses and also prove a quantitative version formulated in terms of Kolmogorov complexity. Our results use a modified version of Mathias forcing and build on work by Seetapun, Liu, and others on the reverse math of Ramsey's theorem for pairs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.01226,
  title  = {Coding information into all infinite subsets of a dense set},
  author = {Matthew Harrison-Trainor and Lu Liu and Patrick Lutz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.01226},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

37 pages. Paper updated to fix typos

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:54:08.958Z