Let be the finite approximation to the halting problem obtained by running the first programs for steps, so and is not computable. For , define the recursive triple colouring with no computable infinite homogeneous set by
This is a total computable function. Here homogeneous sets are required to be infinite: finite homogeneous sets certainly exist. An infinite homogeneous cannot have colour one. Fix ; the finite approximation below eventually stabilizes, so two sufficiently large in give colour zero. If has colour zero, choose in with . For arbitrarily large , homogeneity gives , and hence . Thus computes membership of in . A computable infinite would make the halting problem computable, a contradiction.
For the uncountable partition relation, the Erdős-Rado theorem for finite arities states that for every infinite cardinal and integer ,
The case is the pigeonhole principle: a union of sets of size at most cannot have size . Suppose the assertion holds for . Put and , and let . We give the closed elementary-submodel construction of an end-homogeneous sequence, which avoids intersecting a decreasing family of reservoirs at a limit stage.
Take a sufficiently large regular and an elementary substructure with , containing and all ordinals below , and closed under sequences of length at most . Such an is obtained by successive Skolem hull closures: , and the regularity of puts any at-most--long sequence from the union inside one stage. Put . The set has no greatest element, since taking an ordinal successor is definable in , so .
Recursively choose an increasing sequence in . At stage , its earlier set has size at most , and the colour table on has size at most . Both and this table belong to by its closure. The set
belongs to and is nonempty because it contains . Elementarity supplies . Consequently the colour of each -tuple from the resulting sequence depends only on its first entries. The induction hypothesis applied to these entries gives a homogeneous subsequence of size , proving the result.
Infinite exponents behave differently with the axiom of choice. On the countably infinite subsets of any infinite cardinal , choose a representative of each equivalence class modulo finite symmetric difference. Colour a set by the parity of . Removing one point flips its colour. Every infinite proposed homogeneous set contains an increasing sequence of order type , and that sequence and its tail have opposite colours. Thus the finite-symmetric-difference colouring of infinite subsets gives , whether the domain consists of all countably infinite subsets or only those of order type . There is no unrestricted infinite-arity counterpart to the displayed finite-arity theorem in ZFC.