Informally, a mathematical statement is robust if its strength is left
unchanged under variations of the statement. In this paper, we investigate the
lack of robustness of Ramsey's theorem and its consequence under the frameworks
of reverse mathematics and computable reducibility. To this end, we study the
degrees of unsolvability of cohesive sets for different uniformly computable
sequence of sets and identify different layers of unsolvability. This analysis
enables us to answer some questions of Wang about how typical sets help
computing cohesive sets.
We also study the impact of the number of colors in the computable
reducibility between coloring statements. In particular, we strengthen the
proof by Dzhafarov that cohesiveness does not strongly reduce to stable
Ramsey's theorem for pairs, revealing the combinatorial nature of this
non-reducibility and prove that whenever k is greater than ℓ, stable
Ramsey's theorem for n-tuples and k colors is not computably reducible to
Ramsey's theorem for n-tuples and ℓ colors. In this sense, Ramsey's
theorem is not robust with respect to his number of colors over computable
reducibility. Finally, we separate the thin set and free set theorem from
Ramsey's theorem for pairs and identify an infinite decreasing hierarchy of
thin set theorems in reverse mathematics. This shows that in reverse
mathematics, the strength of Ramsey's theorem is very sensitive to the number
of colors in the output set. In particular, it enables us to answer several
related questions asked by Cholak, Giusto, Hirst and Jockusch.Comment: 31 page