Groupwise dense families

We show that the Filter Dichotomy Principle implies that there are exactly four classes of ideals in the set of increasing functions from the natural numbers. We thus answer two open questions on consequences of ? < ?. We show that ? < ? implies that ? = ?, and that Filter Dichotomy together with ? < ? implies ? < ?. The technical means is the investigation of groupwise dense sets, ideals, filters and ultrafilters. With related techniques we prove the new inequality ?≤ cf(?). Received: 9 October 1998 / Revised version: 18 August 1999 / Published online: 21 December 2000