A General Framework for Priority Arguments

Abstract

The degrees of unsolvability were introduced in the ground-breaking papers of Post [20] and Kleene and Post [7] as an attempt to measure theinformation contentof sets of natural numbers. Kleene and Post were interested in the relative complexity of decision problems arising naturally in mathematics; in particular, they wished to know when a solution to one decision problem contained the information necessary to solve a second decision problem. As decision problems can be coded by sets of natural numbers, this question is equivalent to: Given a computer with access to an oracle which will answer membership questions about a setA, can a program (allowing questions to the oracle) be written which will correctly compute the answers to all membership questions about a setB? If the answer is yes, then we say thatBisTuring reducibletoAand writeB≤TA. We say thatB≡TAifB≤TAandA≤TB. ≡Tis an equivalence relation, and ≤Tinduces a partial ordering on the corresponding equivalence classes; the poset obtained in this way is called thedegrees of unsolvability, and elements of this poset are calleddegrees.Post was particularly interested in computability from sets which are partially generated by a computer, namely, those for which the elements of the set can be enumerated by a computer.