Chaitin Ω numbers and halting problems

Abstract

Chaitin [G. J. Chaitin, J. Assoc. Comput. Mach., vol. 22, pp. 329-340, 1975] introduced his Ω number as a concrete example of random real. The real Ω is defined as the probability that an optimal computer halts, where the optimal computer is a universal decoding algorithm used to define the notion of program-size complexity. Chaitin showed Ω to be random by discovering the property that the first n bits of the base-two expansion of Ω solve the halting problem of the optimal computer for all binary inputs of length at most n. In the present paper we investigate this property from various aspects. It is known that the base-two expansion of Ω and the halting problem are Turing equivalent. We consider elaborations of both the Turing reductions which constitute the Turing equivalence. These elaborations can be seen as a variant of the weak truth-table reduction, where a computable bound on the use function is explicitly specified. We thus consider the relative computational power between the base-two expansion of Ω and the halting problem by imposing the restriction to finite size on both the problems. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.