Boolean Operations, Joins, and the Extended Low Hierarchy

We prove that the join of two sets may actually fall into a lower level of the extended low hierarchy than either of the sets. In particular, there exist sets that are not in the second level of the extended low hierarchy, EL_2, yet their join is in EL_2. That is, in terms of extended lowness, the join operator can lower complexity. Since in a strong intuitive sense the join does not lower complexity, our result suggests that the extended low hierarchy is unnatural as a complexity measure. We also study the closure properties of EL_ and prove that EL_2 is not closed under certain Boolean operations. To this end, we establish the first known (and optimal) EL_2 lower bounds for certain notions generalizing Selman's P-selectivity, which may be regarded as an interesting result in its own right.Comment: 12 page

Lexical Effects in Phonemic Neutralization in Taiwan Mandarin

BLS 38: General Session and Thematic Session on Language Contac

Counting the changes of random Δ20 sets

We study the number of changes of the initial segment Zs ↾n for computable approximations of a Martin-Löf random Δ02Δ20 set Z. We establish connections between this number of changes and various notions of computability theoretic lowness, as well as the fundamental thesis that, among random sets, randomness is antithetical to computational power. We introduce a new randomness notion, called balanced randomness, which implies that for each computable approximation and each constant c, there are infinitely many n such that Zs ↾n changes more than c2n times. We establish various connections with ω-c.e. tracing and omega;-c.e. jump domination, a new lowness property. We also examine some relationships to randomness theoretic notions of highness, and give applications to the study of (weak) Demuth cuppability.Fil: Figueira, Santiago. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Computación; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Hirschfeldt, Denis R.. University of Chicago; Estados UnidosFil: Miller, Joseph S.. University of Wisconsin; Estados UnidosFil: Ng, Keng Meng. Nanyang Technological University; SingapurFil: Nies, André. The University Of Auckland; Nueva Zeland

Query Order and the Polynomial Hierarchy

Hemaspaandra, Hempel, and Wechsung [cs.CC/9909020] initiated the field of query order, which studies the ways in which computational power is affected by the order in which information sources are accessed. The present paper studies, for the first time, query order as it applies to the levels of the polynomial hierarchy. We prove that the levels of the polynomial hierarchy are order-oblivious. Yet, we also show that these ordered query classes form new levels in the polynomial hierarchy unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses. We prove that all leaf language classes - and thus essentially all standard complexity classes - inherit all order-obliviousness results that hold for P.Comment: 14 page