Analytic sets having incomparable kleene degrees

Abstract

One concern of descriptive set theory is the classification of definable sets of reals. Taken loosely ‘definable’ can mean anything from projective to formally describable in the language of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF). Recursiveness, in the case of Kleene recursion, can be a particularly informative notion of definability. Sets of integers, for example, are categorized by their positions in the upper semilattice of Turing degrees, and the algorithms for computing their characteristic functions may be taken as their defining presentations. In turn it is interesting to position the common fauna of descriptive set theory in the upper semilattice of Kleene degrees. In so doing not only do we gain a perspective on the complexity of those sets common to the study of descriptive set theory but also a refinement of the theory of analytic sets of reals. The primary concern of this paper is to calculate the relative complexity of several notable coanalytic sets of reals and display (under suitable set theoretic hypothesis) several natural solutions to Post's problem for Kleene recursion.For sets of reals A and B one says A is Kleene recursive in B (written A ≤KB) iff there is a real y so that the characteristic function XA of A is recursive (in the sense of Kleene [1959]) in y, XB and the existential integer quantifier ∃; i.e. there is an integer e so that XA(x) ≃ {e}(x, y, XB, ≃). Intuitively, membership of a real x ϵ ωω in A can be decided from an oracle for x, y and B using a computing machine with a countably infinite memory and an ability to search and manipulate that memory in finite time. A set is Kleene semirecursive in B if it is the domain of an integer valued partial function recursive in y, XB and ≃ for some real y.