In the December 1982 issue of this Journal Weitkamp [W] posed some questions concerning the incomparability of certain “r.e.” sets for the notion of Kleene reducibility. He asked whether the incomparability of, for example, the Friedman set F (defined below) and the set WI0 (the set of reals coding wellfounded trees of admissible height) was equivalent to the existence of 0#, since forcing over L with a set of conditions could not achieve this. We answer this by showing that in a certain class generic extension of L they are comparable, but 0# does not exist. This is an application of Jensen's coding theorem (cf. [BJW]), using a modified construction due to René David [D]. Indeed the result here is a simple application of his result. Define F as follows:

Harrington showed, in effect, that one could not add a cone of Turing degrees to this set by forcing with sets of conditions over L. The method used here does add a cone of Turing degrees to a much simpler set RI1 (defined below)—and indeed the whole process could be viewed as forcing over L to obtain the determinacy of certain rather simple sets. It is the determinacy of the game with payoff set RI1 that ensures the comparability of F and WI0 (amongst many others).

We shall refrain from repeating all the basic definitions and lemmas since the reader can readily refer to [W]; we shall give the basic necessities.