Avoiding Medvedev reductions inside a linear order

Abstract

While every endpointed interval I in a linear order J is, considered as a linear order in its own right, trivially Muchnik-reducible to J itself, this fails for Medvedev-reductions. We construct an extreme example of this: a linear order in which no endpointed interval is Medvedev-reducible to any other, even allowing parameters, except when the two intervals have finite difference. We also construct a scattered linear order which has many endpointed intervals Medvedev-incomparable to itself; the only other known construction of such a linear order yields an ordinal of extremely high complexity, whereas this construction produces a low-level-arithmetic example. Additionally, the constructions here are “coarse” in the sense that they lift to other uniform reducibility notions in place of Medvedev reducibility itself.