Mass problems and randomness

A mass problem is a set of Turing oracles. If P and Q are mass problems, we say that P is weakly reducible to Q if every member of Q Turing computes a member of P . We say that P is strongly reducible to Q if every member of Q Turing computes a member of P via a fixed Turing functional. The weak degrees and strong degrees are the equivalence classes of mass problems under weak and strong reducibility, respectively. We focus on the countable distributive lattices Pw and Ps of weak and strong degrees of mass problems given by nonempty Π1 subsets of 2 . Using an abstract Gödel/Rosser incompleteness property, we characterize the Π1 subsets of 2 whose associated mass problems are of top degree in Pw and Ps, respectively. Let R be the set of Turing oracles which are random in the sense of Martin-Løf, and let r be the weak degree of R. We show that r is a natural intermediate degree within Pw. Namely, we characterize r as the unique largest weak degree of a Π1 subset of 2 ω of positive measure. Within Pw we show that r is meet irreducible, does not join to 1, and is incomparable with all weak degrees of nonempty thin perfect Π1 subsets of 2. In addition, we present other natural examples of intermediate degrees in Pw. We relate these examples to reverse mathematics, computational complexity, and Gentzen-style proof theory.