916 research outputs found
Positional Determinacy of Games with Infinitely Many Priorities
We study two-player games of infinite duration that are played on finite or
infinite game graphs. A winning strategy for such a game is positional if it
only depends on the current position, and not on the history of the play. A
game is positionally determined if, from each position, one of the two players
has a positional winning strategy.
The theory of such games is well studied for winning conditions that are
defined in terms of a mapping that assigns to each position a priority from a
finite set. Specifically, in Muller games the winner of a play is determined by
the set of those priorities that have been seen infinitely often; an important
special case are parity games where the least (or greatest) priority occurring
infinitely often determines the winner. It is well-known that parity games are
positionally determined whereas Muller games are determined via finite-memory
strategies.
In this paper, we extend this theory to the case of games with infinitely
many priorities. Such games arise in several application areas, for instance in
pushdown games with winning conditions depending on stack contents.
For parity games there are several generalisations to the case of infinitely
many priorities. While max-parity games over omega or min-parity games over
larger ordinals than omega require strategies with infinite memory, we can
prove that min-parity games with priorities in omega are positionally
determined. Indeed, it turns out that the min-parity condition over omega is
the only infinitary Muller condition that guarantees positional determinacy on
all game graphs
Fixpoint Games on Continuous Lattices
Many analysis and verifications tasks, such as static program analyses and
model-checking for temporal logics reduce to the solution of systems of
equations over suitable lattices. Inspired by recent work on lattice-theoretic
progress measures, we develop a game-theoretical approach to the solution of
systems of monotone equations over lattices, where for each single equation
either the least or greatest solution is taken. A simple parity game, referred
to as fixpoint game, is defined that provides a correct and complete
characterisation of the solution of equation systems over continuous lattices,
a quite general class of lattices widely used in semantics. For powerset
lattices the fixpoint game is intimately connected with classical parity games
for -calculus model-checking, whose solution can exploit as a key tool
Jurdzi\'nski's small progress measures. We show how the notion of progress
measure can be naturally generalised to fixpoint games over continuous lattices
and we prove the existence of small progress measures. Our results lead to a
constructive formulation of progress measures as (least) fixpoints. We refine
this characterisation by introducing the notion of selection that allows one to
constrain the plays in the parity game, enabling an effective (and possibly
efficient) solution of the game, and thus of the associated verification
problem. We also propose a logic for specifying the moves of the existential
player that can be used to systematically derive simplified equations for
efficiently computing progress measures. We discuss potential applications to
the model-checking of latticed -calculi and to the solution of fixpoint
equations systems over the reals
Covering of ordinals
The paper focuses on the structure of fundamental sequences of ordinals
smaller than . A first result is the construction of a monadic
second-order formula identifying a given structure, whereas such a formula
cannot exist for ordinals themselves. The structures are precisely classified
in the pushdown hierarchy. Ordinals are also located in the hierarchy, and a
direct presentation is given.Comment: Accepted at FSTTCS'0
The singular world of singular cardinals
The article uses two examples to explore the statement that, contrary to the common wisdom, the properties of singular cardinals are actually more intuitive than those of the regular ones
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