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Saharon Shelah has a series of results he actually calls "black boxesboxes," and uses accordingly (see his paper, "Black Boxes," http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.0656); my understanding is that these are Diamond-like theorems that are provable in ZFC.

(Diamond, for clarification, is a sort of guessing principle: it asserts that there exists a single sequence $(A_\alpha)_{\alpha\in\omega_1}$ such that $A_\alpha\subseteq\alpha$ such that, for any $A\subseteq \omega_1$, the set $$\lbrace \alpha: A_\alpha=A\cap\alpha\rbrace$$ is "large" (specifically, stationary - intersects every closed unbounded subset of $\omega_1$). This principle is not provable in ZFC; it follows from $V=L$ and implies $CH$, but both of these implications are strict. My understanding, which is quite limited, is that Diamond is used in constructions of $\omega_1$-sized structures where one needs to "guess correctly" stationarily often, and that Shelah developed the black boxes to perform many of these same constructions in ZFC alone.)

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Saharon Shelah has a series of results he actually calls "black boxes" (see his paper, "Black Boxes," http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.0656); my understanding is that these are Diamond-like theorems that are provable in ZFC.

(Diamond, for clarification, is a sort of guessing principle: it asserts that there exists a single sequence $(A_\alpha)_{\alpha\in\omega_1}$ such that $A_\alpha\subseteq\alpha$ such that, for any $A\subseteq \omega_1$, the set $$\lbrace \alpha: A_\alpha=A\cap\alpha\rbrace$$ is "large" (specifically, stationary - intersects every closed unbounded subset of $\omega_1$). This principle is not provable in ZFC; it follows from $V=L$ and implies $CH$, but both of these implications are strict. My understanding, which is quite limited, is that Diamond is used in constructions of $\omega_1$-sized structures where one needs to "guess correctly" stationarily often, and that Shelah developed the black boxes to perform many of these same constructions in ZFC alone.)