Infinite games and cardinal properties of topological spaces

Angelo Bella, Santi Spadaro

Published 2012-12-22, updated 2013-02-21Version 2

Inspired by work of Scheepers and Tall, we use properties defined by topological games to provide bounds for the cardinality of topological spaces. We obtain a partial answer to an old question of Bell, Ginsburg and Woods regarding the cardinality of weakly Lindel\"of first-countable regular spaces and answer a question recently asked by Babinkostova, Pansera and Scheepers. In the second part of the paper we study a game-theoretic version of cellularity, a special case of which has been introduced by Aurichi. We obtain a game-theoretic proof of Shapirovskii's bound for the number of regular open sets in an (almost) regular space and give a partial answer to a natural question about the productivity of a game strengthening of the countable chain condition that was introduced by Aurichi. As a final application of our results we prove that the Hajnal-Juh\'asz bound for the cardinality of a first-countable ccc Hausdorff space is true for almost regular (non-Hausdorff) spaces.