FOM: Provably non-constructive priority argument

[John Case]

Harvey Friedman and later Steve Simpson asked in fom about priority arguments
for results provably non-constructive.

Some years back I posed a specific conjecture along these lines to Mark Fulk,
one of my then Ph.D. students.  My conjecture posited particular inherently 
non-constructive elements re the existence of almost everywhere h-complex
0-1 valued computable functions.  The standard construction of these is by a 
zero-injury priority construction.  Mark's proof of my conjecture appears
in [M. Fulk, ``A note on almost everywhere h-complex functions,'' Journal of 
Computer and System Sciences, 40 (1990), 444-449].  The statement and proof are
entirely recursion-theoretic.  Odifreddi's Classical Recursion Theory, Vol. II,
also has a discussion, pp. 27-30.

John 

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