Degrees of unsolvability of continuous functions
Joseph S. Miller · Journal of Symbolic Logic · 2004
Abstract. We show that the Turing degrees are not sufficient to measure the complexity of continuous functions on [0, 1]. Computability of continuous real functions is a standard notion from computable analysis. However, no satisfactory theory of degrees of continuous functions exists. We introduce the continuous degrees and prove that they are a proper extension of the Turing degrees and a proper substructure of the enumeration degrees. Call continuous degrees which are not Turing degrees non-total. Several fundamental results are proved: a continuous function with non-total degree has no least degree representation, settling a question asked by Pour-El and Lempp; every non-computable f ∈ [0,1] computes a non-computable subset of ℕ there is a non-total degree between Turing degrees a