English

Some Observations on Infinitary Complexity

Logic 2026-05-19 v1

Abstract

Continuing the study of complexity theory of Koepke's Ordinal Turing Machines (OTMs) that was started by Rin, L\"owe and the author, we prove the following results: (1) An analogue of Ladner's theorem for OTMs holds: That is, there are languages L\mathcal{L} which are NP^{\infty}, but neither P^{\infty} nor NP^{\infty}-complete. This answers an open question of \cite{CLR}. (2) The speedup theorem for Turing machines, which allows us to bring down the computation time and space usage of a Turing machine program down by an aribtrary positive factor under relatively mild side conditions by expanding the working alphabet does not hold for OTMs. (3) We show that, for α<β\alpha<\beta such that α\alpha is the halting time of some OTM-program, there are decision problems that are OTM-decidable in time bounded by wβγ|w|^{\beta}\cdot\gamma for some γOn\gamma\in\text{On}, but not in time bounded by wαγ|w|^{\alpha}\cdot\gamma for any γOn\gamma\in\text{On}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1801.10027,
  title  = {Some Observations on Infinitary Complexity},
  author = {Merlin Carl},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.10027},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T00:03:44.705Z