ON THE UNIFORM COMPUTATIONAL CONTENT OF RAMSEY’S THEOREM

Abstract

AbstractWe study the uniform computational content of Ramsey’s theorem in the Weihrauch lattice. Our central results provide information on how Ramsey’s theorem behaves under product, parallelization, and jumps. From these results we can derive a number of important properties of Ramsey’s theorem. For one, the parallelization of Ramsey’s theorem for cardinalityn≥ 1 and an arbitrary finite number of colorsk≥ 2 is equivalent to then-th jump of weak Kőnig’s lemma. In particular, Ramsey’s theorem for cardinalityn≥ 1 is${\bf{\Sigma }}_{n + 2}^0$-measurable in the effective Borel hierarchy, but not${\bf{\Sigma }}_{n + 1}^0$-measurable. Secondly, we obtain interesting lower bounds, for instance then-th jump of weak Kőnig’s lemma is Weihrauch reducible to (the stable version of) Ramsey’s theorem of cardinalityn+ 2 forn≥ 2. We prove that with strictly increasing numbers of colors Ramsey’s theorem forms a strictly increasing chain in the Weihrauch lattice. Our study of jumps also shows that certain uniform variants of Ramsey’s theorem that are indistinguishable from a nonuniform perspective play an important role. For instance, the colored version of Ramsey’s theorem explicitly includes the color of the homogeneous set as output information, and the jump of this problem (but not the uncolored variant) is equivalent to the stable version of Ramsey’s theorem of the next greater cardinality. Finally, we briefly discuss the particular case of Ramsey’s theorem for pairs, and we provide some new separation techniques for problems that involve jumps in this context. In particular, we study uniform results regarding the relation of boundedness and induction problems to Ramsey’s theorem, and we show that there are some significant differences with the nonuniform situation in reverse mathematics.