Theorem 2 (Completeness) Whenever
then also
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Proof: We prove the contrapositive. Assume that We will find an
that extends
and does not extend any
Towards this end, enumerate all finite strings as
Let We define a sequence
by recursion as follows:
- Given
with the property that
let
unless
either, in which case, let
Now let and note that
satisfies the following properties:
by construction and compactness.
- For any
iff
The left-to-right implication is clear from (1). The other direction holds by construction: If
and
then certainly
and therefore
- In particular,
It is actually
that interests us. In terms of
property (3) says that
is a tree.To see this, suppose that
where
Then, by property (2),
But then, certainly,
so, by (2) again,
This shows that
is closed under initial segments.
is actually a branch, i.e.,
is a singleton.To see this, suppose that
We need to show that there is a unique
such that
Since
then
Suppose first that both
and
are in
Then, by compression,
and therefore
a contradiction.
Suppose now that neither
nor
is in
Then
for both
and
It then follows, using Fact 3 from last lecture, that
again a contradiction. This gives the result.
Finally, let be the unique element of
Note that
extends
since
Note also that
extends no element of
since no element of
is in
and the initial segments of
are precisely the elements of
This proves that
This is the reason why this formal system is called a tree system; both because of this argument, and because of the relation that it implies between this system and König’s lemma, as we will see below.
To illustrate the interplay resulting from the equivalence of the two relations and
consider the following two proofs:
Corollary 3
is compact.
Proof: Given a covering of by open sets, let
be the collection of strings
such that the basic open set
is completely contained in one of the open sets in the covering.
Then
and it follows that Therefore
for some finite subset
of
so
and any finite collection of open sets in the covering that contain the sets
for
constitutes a finite subcovering of
It is not, of course, that the compactness of is a deep result. But the trivial argument just given helps explain some of the difficulties we found previously, since our results supersede this topological theorem.
Corollary 4 König’s lemma holds for infinite subtrees of
.
Proof: Given a tree suppose that
and let
Then
so, by completeness and Fact 5 from last lecture, there is a finite
and an
such that any
of length
or larger extends an element of
Note now that is closed under extensions, since
is a tree. It follows that
contains all strings of
s and
s, of length
or larger. But then
i.e.,
is finite.
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