The complexity of equivalence relations has received much attention in the recent literature. The main tool for such endeavour is the following reducibility: given equivalence relations $R$ and $S$ on natural numbers, $R$ is computably reducible to $S$ if there is a computable function $f colon omega to omega$ that induces an injective map from $R$-equivalence classes to $S$-equivalence classes. In order to compare the complexity of equivalence relations which are computable, researchers considered also feasible variants of computable reducibility, such as the polynomial-time reducibility. In this work, we explore $mathbf{Peq}$, the degree structure generated by primitive recursive reducibility on punctual equivalence relations (i.e., primitive recursive equivalence relations with domain $omega$). In contrast with all other known degree structures on equivalence relations, we show that $mathbf{Peq}$ has much more structure: e.g., we show that it is a dense distributive lattice. On the other hand, we also offer evidence of the intricacy of $mathbf{Peq}$, proving, e.g., that the structure is neither rigid nor homogeneous.
Download