On the computational properties of ambivalent sets and functions
Abstract
Examples of discontinuous functions already appear in the work of Euler, Abel, Dirichlet, Fourier, and Bolzano. A ground-breaking discovery due to Baire was that many discontinuous functions are well-behaved in that they are the pointwise limit of a sequence of continuous functions; the latter form a class nowadays simply called `Baire 1'. We shall study a class strictly between the semi-continuous and Baire 1 functions, called the ambivalent fuctions. In particular, we investigate the computational properties of the class of ambivalent functions and sets, denoted , working with Kleene's S1-S9 schemes. Computational equivalences for various standard operations (supremum, Baire 1 representation, \dots) on are established, including the structure functional that decides if a given ambivalent set is non-empty. A selector is shown to be computable relative to and Kleene's quantifier .
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.05620,
title = {On the computational properties of ambivalent sets and functions},
author = {Dag Normann and Sam Sanders},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.05620},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
15 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2401.09053