686 research outputs found
Deciding the First Levels of the Modal mu Alternation Hierarchy by Formula Construction
We construct, for any sentence of the modal mu calculus Psi, derived sentences in the modal fragment and the fragment without least fixpoints of the modal mu calculus such that Psi is equivalent to a formula in these fragments if and only if it is equivalent to these formulas. The formula without greatest fixpoints that Psi is equivalent to if and only if it is equivalent to any formula without greatest fixpoint is obtained by duality. This yields a constructive proof of decidability of the first levels of the modal mu alternation hierarchy. The blow-up incurred by turning Psi into the modal formula is shown to be necessary: there are modal formulas that can be expressed sub-exponentially more efficiently with the use of fixpoints. For the fragments with only greatest or least fixpoints however, as long as formulas are in disjunctive form, the transformation into a formula syntactically in these fragments does not increase the size of the formula
Disjunctive form and the modal alternation hierarchy
This paper studies the relationship between disjunctive form, a syntactic
normal form for the modal mu calculus, and the alternation hierarchy. First it
shows that all disjunctive formulas which have equivalent tableau have the same
syntactic alternation depth. However, tableau equivalence only preserves
alternation depth for the disjunctive fragment: there are disjunctive formulas
with arbitrarily high alternation depth that are tableau equivalent to
alternation-free non-disjunctive formulas. Conversely, there are
non-disjunctive formulas of arbitrarily high alternation depth that are tableau
equivalent to disjunctive formulas without alternations. This answers
negatively the so far open question of whether disjunctive form preserves
alternation depth. The classes of formulas studied here illustrate a previously
undocumented type of avoidable syntactic complexity which may contribute to our
understanding of why deciding the alternation hierarchy is still an open
problem.Comment: In Proceedings FICS 2015, arXiv:1509.0282
On P-transitive graphs and applications
We introduce a new class of graphs which we call P-transitive graphs, lying
between transitive and 3-transitive graphs. First we show that the analogue of
de Jongh-Sambin Theorem is false for wellfounded P-transitive graphs; then we
show that the mu-calculus fixpoint hierarchy is infinite for P-transitive
graphs. Both results contrast with the case of transitive graphs. We give also
an undecidability result for an enriched mu-calculus on P-transitive graphs.
Finally, we consider a polynomial time reduction from the model checking
problem on arbitrary graphs to the model checking problem on P-transitive
graphs. All these results carry over to 3-transitive graphs.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2011, arXiv:1106.081
Advances and applications of automata on words and trees : abstracts collection
From 12.12.2010 to 17.12.2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10501 "Advances and Applications of Automata on Words and Trees" was held in Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available
Fixed-point elimination in the intuitionistic propositional calculus
It is a consequence of existing literature that least and greatest
fixed-points of monotone polynomials on Heyting algebras-that is, the algebraic
models of the Intuitionistic Propositional Calculus-always exist, even when
these algebras are not complete as lattices. The reason is that these extremal
fixed-points are definable by formulas of the IPC. Consequently, the
-calculus based on intuitionistic logic is trivial, every -formula
being equivalent to a fixed-point free formula. We give in this paper an
axiomatization of least and greatest fixed-points of formulas, and an algorithm
to compute a fixed-point free formula equivalent to a given -formula. The
axiomatization of the greatest fixed-point is simple. The axiomatization of the
least fixed-point is more complex, in particular every monotone formula
converges to its least fixed-point by Kleene's iteration in a finite number of
steps, but there is no uniform upper bound on the number of iterations. We
extract, out of the algorithm, upper bounds for such n, depending on the size
of the formula. For some formulas, we show that these upper bounds are
polynomial and optimal
Using automata to characterise fixed point temporal logics
This work examines propositional fixed point temporal and modal logics called mu-calculi and their relationship to automata on infinite strings and trees. We use correspondences between formulae and automata to explore definability in mu-calculi and their fragments, to provide normal forms for formulae, and to prove completeness of axiomatisations. The study of such methods for describing infinitary languages is of fundamental importance to the areas of computer science dealing with non-terminating computations, in particular to the specification and verification of concurrent and reactive systems.
To emphasise the close relationship between formulae of mu-calculi and alternating automata, we introduce a new first recurrence acceptance condition for automata, checking intuitively whether the first infinitely often occurring state in a run is accepting. Alternating first recurrence automata can be identified with mu-calculus formulae, and ordinary, non-alternating first recurrence automata with formulae in a particular normal form, the strongly aconjunctive form. Automata with more traditional Büchi and Rabin acceptance conditions can be easily unwound to first recurrence automata, i.e. to mu-calculus formulae.
In the other direction, we describe a powerset operation for automata that corresponds to fixpoints, allowing us to translate formulae inductively to ordinary Büchi and Rabin-automata. These translations give easy proofs of the facts that Rabin-automata, the full mu-calculus, its strongly aconjunctive fragment and the monadic second-order calculus of n successors SnS are all equiexpressive, that Büchi-automata, the fixpoint alternation class Pi_2 and the strongly aconjunctive fragment of Pi_2 are similarly related, and that the weak SnS and the fixpoint-alternation-free fragment of mu-calculus also coincide. As corollaries we obtain Rabin's complementation lemma and the powerful decidability result of SnS.
We then describe a direct tableau decision method for modal and linear-time mu-calculi, based on the notion of definition trees. The tableaux can be interpreted as first recurrence automata, so the construction can also be viewed as a transformation to the strongly aconjunctive normal form.
Finally, we present solutions to two open axiomatisation problems, for the linear-time mu-calculus and its extension with path quantifiers. Both completeness proofs are based on transforming formulae to normal forms inspired by automata. In extending the completeness result of the linear-time mu-calculus to the version with path quantifiers, the essential problem is capturing the limit closure property of paths in an axiomatisation. To this purpose, we introduce a new \exists\nu-induction inference rule
Analysis of Boolean Equation Systems through Structure Graphs
We analyse the problem of solving Boolean equation systems through the use of
structure graphs. The latter are obtained through an elegant set of
Plotkin-style deduction rules. Our main contribution is that we show that
equation systems with bisimilar structure graphs have the same solution. We
show that our work conservatively extends earlier work, conducted by Keiren and
Willemse, in which dependency graphs were used to analyse a subclass of Boolean
equation systems, viz., equation systems in standard recursive form. We
illustrate our approach by a small example, demonstrating the effect of
simplifying an equation system through minimisation of its structure graph
Index problems for game automata
For a given regular language of infinite trees, one can ask about the minimal
number of priorities needed to recognize this language with a
non-deterministic, alternating, or weak alternating parity automaton. These
questions are known as, respectively, the non-deterministic, alternating, and
weak Rabin-Mostowski index problems. Whether they can be answered effectively
is a long-standing open problem, solved so far only for languages recognizable
by deterministic automata (the alternating variant trivializes).
We investigate a wider class of regular languages, recognizable by so-called
game automata, which can be seen as the closure of deterministic ones under
complementation and composition. Game automata are known to recognize languages
arbitrarily high in the alternating Rabin-Mostowski index hierarchy; that is,
the alternating index problem does not trivialize any more.
Our main contribution is that all three index problems are decidable for
languages recognizable by game automata. Additionally, we show that it is
decidable whether a given regular language can be recognized by a game
automaton
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