New bounds on the strength of some restrictions of Hindman’s theorem

Abstract

We prove upper and lower bounds on the effective content and logical strength for a variety of natural restrictions of Hindman’s Finite Sums Theorem. For example, we show that Hindman’s Theorem for sums of length at most 2 and 4 colors implies ACA0. An emerging leitmotiv is that the known lower bounds for Hindman’s Theorem and for its restriction to sums of at most 2 elements are already valid for a number of restricted versions which have simple proofs and better computability- and proof-theoretic upper bounds than the known upper bound for the full version of the theorem. We highlight the role of a sparsity-like condition on the solution set, which we call apartness.