Games played on Boolean algebras

Abstract

In this paper we consider the special case of the Banach-Mazur game played on a topological space when the space also has an underlying Boolean Algebra structure. This case was first studied by Jech [2]. The version of the Banach-Mazur game we will play is the following game played on the Boolean algebra:Players I and II alternate moves playing a descending sequence of elements of a Boolean algebra ℬ.Player II wins the game iff Πi∈ωbi ≠ 0. Jech first considered these games and showed:Theorem (Jech [2]). ℬ is (ω1, ∞)-distributive iff player I does not have a winning strategy in the game played on ℬ.If ℬ has a dense ω-closed subset then it is easy to see that player II has a winning strategy in this game. This paper establishes a partial converse to this, namely it gives cardinality conditions on ℬ under which II having a winning strategy implies ω-closure.In the course of proving the converse, we consider games of length > ω and generalize Jech's theorem to these games. Finally we present an example due to C. Gray that stands in counterpoint to the theorems in this paper.In this section we give a few basis definitions and explain our notation. These definitions are all standard.