Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2014
For countable structures and , let abbreviate the statement that every sentence true in also holds in . One can define a back and forth game between the structures and that determines whether . We verify that if θ is an Lω,ω sentence that is not equivalent to any Lω,ω sentence, then there are countably infinite models and such that ⊨ θ, ⊨ ¬θ, and . For countable languages ℒ there is a natural way to view ℒ structúres with universe ω as a topological space, Xℒ. Let [] = { ∊ Xℒ∣ ≅ } denote the isomorphism class of . Let and be countably infinite nonisomorphic ℒ structures, and let C ⊆ ωω be any subset. Our main result states that if , then there is a continuous function f: ωω → Xℒ with the property that x ∊ C ⇒ f(x) ∊ [] and x ∉ C ⇒ f(x) ∊ f(x) ∈ []. In fact, for α ≤ 3, the continuous function f can be defined from the relation.