We examine the relation of BSS-reducibility on subsets of the real numbers.
The question was asked recently (and anonymously) whether it is possible for
the halting problem H in BSS-computation to be BSS-reducible to a countable
set. Intuitively, it seems that a countable set ought not to contain enough
information to decide membership in a reasonably complex (uncountable) set such
as H. We confirm this intuition, and prove a more general theorem linking the
cardinality of the oracle set to the cardinality, in a local sense, of the set
which it computes. We also mention other recent results on BSS-computation and
algebraic real numbers
