Hoare domination preorder 2026-10-06
For subsets of a preorder, Hoare domination means every source element has some greater or equal target element: . It is reflexive and transitive. If the base is a well-quasi-ordering, its finite subsets are well-quasi-ordered by this relation; arbitrary subsets need not be, as the Rado order shows.
As printed, yes: the relation is universal. The original PDF puts the existentially quantified element in the same subset as the universally quantified element; this is not an OCR substitution. For each element of that subset, choose the element itself as witness, using reflexivity of the underlying well-quasi-ordering. For an empty subset the condition is vacuous. The truth value therefore never depends on the proposed target subset. On the power set this is a reflexive transitive relation, and every two terms of any infinite sequence are related:
A well-quasi-ordering need not be antisymmetric, so universal comparability is allowed.
If the existential element is instead intended to belong to the target subset, the natural relation is the Hoare domination preorder
For arbitrary subsets the answer to that corrected question is no. Here is a complete counterexample, the Rado order. Take
This is a partial order. Reflexivity is immediate. For transitivity, two same-row comparisons compose ordinarily. If the first comparison crosses rows and the second stays in its row, its target first coordinate is unchanged, so the cross-row inequality persists. If the first stays in its row and the second crosses, use ; if both cross, use . Antisymmetry follows because comparisons across distinct rows in both directions would require .
The Rado order is a well-quasi-ordering. Given an infinite sequence , if a first coordinate repeats infinitely often, its corresponding natural-number second coordinates have a nondecreasing pair, giving a same-row comparison. Otherwise each first coordinate occurs only finitely often, so the first coordinates in every tail are unbounded. In particular some later exceeds , giving .
For each , take the infinite row . For distinct , choose . The element is below no member of , since its first coordinate is different and fails. Thus for every pair of distinct indices. These subsets form an infinite antichain, so the Hoare domination preorder on is not a well-quasi-ordering.
If only finite subsets were intended, the answer changes again: the finite-subset lifting of a well-quasi-order is a well-quasi-ordering. Enumerate each finite subset as a finite word. Higman lemma gives an earlier word embedding into a later one with every letter increased, which witnesses Hoare domination preorder comparison of the underlying subsets. The PDF specifies no finiteness restriction, so this observation supplements rather than replaces the literal answer and the arbitrary-subset counterexample.