A Polychromatic Ramsey Theory for Ordinals

Abstract

The Ramsey degree of an ordinal α is the least number n such that any colouring of the edges of the complete graph on α using finitely many colours contains an n-chromatic clique of order type α. The Ramsey degree exists for any ordinal α < ω ω . We provide an explicit expression for computing the Ramsey degree given α. We further establish a version of this result for automatic structures. In this version the ordinal and the colouring are presentable by finite automata and the clique is additionally required to be regular. The corresponding automatic Ramsey degree turns out to be greater than the set theoretic Ramsey degree. Finally, we demonstrate that a version for computable structures fails.