English

Speedability of computably approximable reals and their approximations

Logic 2026-03-30 v1 Logic in Computer Science

Abstract

An approximation of a real is a sequence of rational numbers that converges to the real. An approximation is left-c.e. if it is computable and nondecreasing and is d.c.e. if it is computable and has bounded variation. A real is computably approximable if it has some computable approximation, and left-c.e. and d.c.e. reals are defined accordingly. An approximation {as}sω\{a_s\}_{s \in \omega} is speedable if there exists a nondecreasing computable function ff such that the approximation {af(s)}sω\{a_{f(s)}\}_{s \in \omega} converges in a certain formal sense faster than {as}sω\{a_s\}_{s \in \omega}. This leads to various notions of speedability for reals, e.g., one may require for a computably approximable real that either all or some of its approximations of a specific type are speedable. Merkle and Titov established the equivalence of several speedability notions for left-c.e. reals that are defined in terms of left-c.e. approximations. We extend these results to d.c.e. reals and d.c.e. approximations, and we prove that in this setting, being speedable is equivalent to not being Martin-L\"{o}f random. Finally, we demonstrate that every computably approximable real has a computable approximation that is speedable.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.26484,
  title  = {Speedability of computably approximable reals and their approximations},
  author = {George Barmpalias and Nan Fang and Wolfgang Merkle and Ivan Titov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.26484},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:40:54.360Z