Automata with Nested Pebbles Capture First-Order Logic with Transitive Closure

String languages recognizable in (deterministic) log-space are characterized either by two-way (deterministic) multi-head automata, or following Immerman, by first-order logic with (deterministic) transitive closure. Here we elaborate this result, and match the number of heads to the arity of the transitive closure. More precisely, first-order logic with k-ary deterministic transitive closure has the same power as deterministic automata walking on their input with k heads, additionally using a finite set of nested pebbles. This result is valid for strings, ordered trees, and in general for families of graphs having a fixed automaton that can be used to traverse the nodes of each of the graphs in the family. Other examples of such families are grids, toruses, and rectangular mazes. For nondeterministic automata, the logic is restricted to positive occurrences of transitive closure. The special case of k=1 for trees, shows that single-head deterministic tree-walking automata with nested pebbles are characterized by first-order logic with unary deterministic transitive closure. This refines our earlier result that placed these automata between first-order and monadic second-order logic on trees.Comment: Paper for Logical Methods in Computer Science, 27 pages, 1 figur

Transitive Closure Logic and Multihead Automata with Nested Pebbles

Several extensions of first-order logic are studied in descriptive complexity theory. These extensions include transitive closure logic and deterministic transitive closure logic, which extend first-order logic with transitive closure operators. It is known that deterministic transitive closure logic captures the complexity class of the languages that are decidable by some deterministic Turing machine using a logarithmic amount of memory space. An analogous result holds for transitive closure logic and nondeterministic Turing machines. This thesis concerns the k-ary fragments of these two logics. In each k-ary fragment, the arities of transitive closure operators appearing in formulas are restricted to a nonzero natural number k. The expressivity of these fragments can be studied in terms of multihead finite automata. The type of automaton that we consider in this thesis is a two-way multihead automaton with nested pebbles. We look at the expressive power of multihead automata and the k-ary fragments of transitive closure logics in the class of finite structures called word models. We show that deterministic twoway k-head automata with nested pebbles have the same expressive power as first-order logic with k-ary deterministic transitive closure. For a corresponding result in the case of nondeterministic automata, we restrict to the positive fragment of k-ary transitive closure logic. The two theorems and their proofs are based on the article ’Automata with nested pebbles capture first-order logic with transitive closure’ by Joost Engelfriet and Hendrik Jan Hoogeboom. In the article, the results are proved in the case of trees. Since word models can be viewed as a special type of trees, the theorems considered in this thesis are a special case of a more general result

First-Order and Temporal Logics for Nested Words

Nested words are a structured model of execution paths in procedural programs, reflecting their call and return nesting structure. Finite nested words also capture the structure of parse trees and other tree-structured data, such as XML. We provide new temporal logics for finite and infinite nested words, which are natural extensions of LTL, and prove that these logics are first-order expressively-complete. One of them is based on adding a "within" modality, evaluating a formula on a subword, to a logic CaRet previously studied in the context of verifying properties of recursive state machines (RSMs). The other logic, NWTL, is based on the notion of a summary path that uses both the linear and nesting structures. For NWTL we show that satisfiability is EXPTIME-complete, and that model-checking can be done in time polynomial in the size of the RSM model and exponential in the size of the NWTL formula (and is also EXPTIME-complete). Finally, we prove that first-order logic over nested words has the three-variable property, and we present a temporal logic for nested words which is complete for the two-variable fragment of first-order.Comment: revised and corrected version of Mar 03, 201

Temporal Logics on Words with Multiple Data Values

The paper proposes and studies temporal logics for attributed words, that is, data words with a (finite) set of (attribute,value)-pairs at each position. It considers a basic logic which is a semantical fragment of the logic $LTL^downarrow_1$ of Demri and Lazic with operators for navigation into the future and the past. By reduction to the emptiness problem for data automata it is shown that this basic logic is decidable. Whereas the basic logic only allows navigation to positions where a fixed data value occurs, extensions are studied that also allow navigation to positions with different data values. Besides some undecidable results it is shown that the extension by a certain UNTIL-operator with an inequality target condition remains decidable

The Arity Hierarchy in the Polyadic μ\mu-Calculus

The polyadic mu-calculus is a modal fixpoint logic whose formulas define relations of nodes rather than just sets in labelled transition systems. It can express exactly the polynomial-time computable and bisimulation-invariant queries on finite graphs. In this paper we show a hierarchy result with respect to expressive power inside the polyadic mu-calculus: for every level of fixpoint alternation, greater arity of relations gives rise to higher expressive power. The proof uses a diagonalisation argument.Comment: In Proceedings FICS 2015, arXiv:1509.0282

Limit Your Consumption! Finding Bounds in Average-energy Games

Energy games are infinite two-player games played in weighted arenas with quantitative objectives that restrict the consumption of a resource modeled by the weights, e.g., a battery that is charged and drained. Typically, upper and/or lower bounds on the battery capacity are part of the problem description. Here, we consider the problem of determining upper bounds on the average accumulated energy or on the capacity while satisfying a given lower bound, i.e., we do not determine whether a given bound is sufficient to meet the specification, but if there exists a sufficient bound to meet it. In the classical setting with positive and negative weights, we show that the problem of determining the existence of a sufficient bound on the long-run average accumulated energy can be solved in doubly-exponential time. Then, we consider recharge games: here, all weights are negative, but there are recharge edges that recharge the energy to some fixed capacity. We show that bounding the long-run average energy in such games is complete for exponential time. Then, we consider the existential version of the problem, which turns out to be solvable in polynomial time: here, we ask whether there is a recharge capacity that allows the system player to win the game. We conclude by studying tradeoffs between the memory needed to implement strategies and the bounds they realize. We give an example showing that memory can be traded for bounds and vice versa. Also, we show that increasing the capacity allows to lower the average accumulated energy.Comment: In Proceedings QAPL'16, arXiv:1610.0769

Computer aided synthesis: a game theoretic approach

In this invited contribution, we propose a comprehensive introduction to game theory applied in computer aided synthesis. In this context, we give some classical results on two-player zero-sum games and then on multi-player non zero-sum games. The simple case of one-player games is strongly related to automata theory on infinite words. All along the article, we focus on general approaches to solve the studied problems, and we provide several illustrative examples as well as intuitions on the proofs.Comment: Invitation contribution for conference "Developments in Language Theory" (DLT 2017