Lower bounds on the redundancy in computations from random oracles via betting strategies with restricted wagers

The Kučera–Gács theorem is a landmark result in algorithmic randomness asserting that every real is computable from a Martin-Löf random real. If the computation of the first n bits of a sequence requires n+h(n) bits of the random oracle, then h is the redundancy of the computation. Kučera implicitly achieved redundancy nlog⁡n while Gács used a more elaborate coding procedure which achieves redundancy View the MathML source. A similar bound is implicit in the later proof by Merkle and Mihailović. In this paper we obtain optimal strict lower bounds on the redundancy in computations from Martin-Löf random oracles. We show that any nondecreasing computable function g such that ∑n2−g(n)=∞ is not a general upper bound on the redundancy in computations from Martin-Löf random oracles. In fact, there exists a real X such that the redundancy g of any computation of X from a Martin-Löf random oracle satisfies ∑n2−g(n)<∞. Moreover, the class of such reals is comeager and includes a View the MathML source real as well as all weakly 2-generic reals. On the other hand, it has been recently shown that any real is computable from a Martin-Löf random oracle with redundancy g, provided that g is a computable nondecreasing function such that ∑n2−g(n)<∞. Hence our lower bound is optimal, and excludes many slow growing functions such as log⁡n from bounding the redundancy in computations from random oracles for a large class of reals. Our results are obtained as an application of a theory of effective betting strategies with restricted wagers which we develop.