An Enhanced Theory of Infinite Time Register Machines

We extend in a natural way the operation of Turing machines to infinite ordinal time, and investigate the resulting supertask theory of computability and decidability on the reals. Every set. for example, is decidable by such machines, and the semi-decidable sets form a portion of the sets. Our oracle concept leads to a notion of relative computability for sets of reals and a rich degree structure, stratified by two natural jump operators.

We define the notion of ordinal computability by generalizing standard T uring computability on tapes of length ω to computations on tapes of arbitrary ordinal length. We show that a set of ordinals is ordinal computable from a finite set of ordinal parameters if and only if it is an element of G ödel's constructible universe L . This characterization can be used to prove the generalized continuum hypothesis in L .