1,580 research outputs found
Reachability in Higher-Order-Counters
Higher-order counter automata (\HOCS) can be either seen as a restriction of
higher-order pushdown automata (\HOPS) to a unary stack alphabet, or as an
extension of counter automata to higher levels. We distinguish two principal
kinds of \HOCS: those that can test whether the topmost counter value is zero
and those which cannot.
We show that control-state reachability for level \HOCS with -test is
complete for \mbox{}-fold exponential space; leaving out the -test
leads to completeness for \mbox{}-fold exponential time. Restricting
\HOCS (without -test) to level , we prove that global (forward or
backward) reachability analysis is \PTIME-complete. This enhances the known
result for pushdown systems which are subsumed by level \HOCS without
-test.
We transfer our results to the formal language setting. Assuming that \PTIME
\subsetneq \PSPACE \subsetneq \mathbf{EXPTIME}, we apply proof ideas of
Engelfriet and conclude that the hierarchies of languages of \HOPS and of \HOCS
form strictly interleaving hierarchies. Interestingly, Engelfriet's
constructions also allow to conclude immediately that the hierarchy of
collapsible pushdown languages is strict level-by-level due to the existing
complexity results for reachability on collapsible pushdown graphs. This
answers an open question independently asked by Parys and by Kobayashi.Comment: Version with Full Proofs of a paper that appears at MFCS 201
Formats of Winning Strategies for Six Types of Pushdown Games
The solution of parity games over pushdown graphs (Walukiewicz '96) was the
first step towards an effective theory of infinite-state games. It was shown
that winning strategies for pushdown games can be implemented again as pushdown
automata. We continue this study and investigate the connection between game
presentations and winning strategies in altogether six cases of game arenas,
among them realtime pushdown systems, visibly pushdown systems, and counter
systems. In four cases we show by a uniform proof method that we obtain
strategies implementable by the same type of pushdown machine as given in the
game arena. We prove that for the two remaining cases this correspondence
fails. In the conclusion we address the question of an abstract criterion that
explains the results
Edit Distance for Pushdown Automata
The edit distance between two words is the minimal number of word
operations (letter insertions, deletions, and substitutions) necessary to
transform to . The edit distance generalizes to languages
, where the edit distance from to
is the minimal number such that for every word from
there exists a word in with edit distance at
most . We study the edit distance computation problem between pushdown
automata and their subclasses. The problem of computing edit distance to a
pushdown automaton is undecidable, and in practice, the interesting question is
to compute the edit distance from a pushdown automaton (the implementation, a
standard model for programs with recursion) to a regular language (the
specification). In this work, we present a complete picture of decidability and
complexity for the following problems: (1)~deciding whether, for a given
threshold , the edit distance from a pushdown automaton to a finite
automaton is at most , and (2)~deciding whether the edit distance from a
pushdown automaton to a finite automaton is finite.Comment: An extended version of a paper accepted to ICALP 2015 with the same
title. The paper has been accepted to the LMCS journa
On external presentations of infinite graphs
The vertices of a finite state system are usually a subset of the natural
numbers. Most algorithms relative to these systems only use this fact to select
vertices.
For infinite state systems, however, the situation is different: in
particular, for such systems having a finite description, each state of the
system is a configuration of some machine. Then most algorithmic approaches
rely on the structure of these configurations. Such characterisations are said
internal. In order to apply algorithms detecting a structural property (like
identifying connected components) one may have first to transform the system in
order to fit the description needed for the algorithm. The problem of internal
characterisation is that it hides structural properties, and each solution
becomes ad hoc relatively to the form of the configurations.
On the contrary, external characterisations avoid explicit naming of the
vertices. Such characterisation are mostly defined via graph transformations.
In this paper we present two kind of external characterisations:
deterministic graph rewriting, which in turn characterise regular graphs,
deterministic context-free languages, and rational graphs. Inverse substitution
from a generator (like the complete binary tree) provides characterisation for
prefix-recognizable graphs, the Caucal Hierarchy and rational graphs. We
illustrate how these characterisation provide an efficient tool for the
representation of infinite state systems
Algebraic properties of structured context-free languages: old approaches and novel developments
The historical research line on the algebraic properties of structured CF
languages initiated by McNaughton's Parenthesis Languages has recently
attracted much renewed interest with the Balanced Languages, the Visibly
Pushdown Automata languages (VPDA), the Synchronized Languages, and the
Height-deterministic ones. Such families preserve to a varying degree the basic
algebraic properties of Regular languages: boolean closure, closure under
reversal, under concatenation, and Kleene star. We prove that the VPDA family
is strictly contained within the Floyd Grammars (FG) family historically known
as operator precedence. Languages over the same precedence matrix are known to
be closed under boolean operations, and are recognized by a machine whose pop
or push operations on the stack are purely determined by terminal letters. We
characterize VPDA's as the subclass of FG having a peculiarly structured set of
precedence relations, and balanced grammars as a further restricted case. The
non-counting invariance property of FG has a direct implication for VPDA too.Comment: Extended version of paper presented at WORDS2009, Salerno,Italy,
September 200
Tree transducers, L systems, and two-way machines
A relationship between parallel rewriting systems and two-way machines is investigated. Restrictions on the âcopying powerâ of these devices endow them with rich structuring and give insight into the issues of determinism, parallelism, and copying. Among the parallel rewriting systems considered are the top-down tree transducer; the generalized syntax-directed translation scheme and the ETOL system, and among the two-way machines are the tree-walking automaton, the two-way finite-state transducer, and (generalizations of) the one-way checking stack automaton. The. relationship of these devices to macro grammars is also considered. An effort is made .to provide a systematic survey of a number of existing results
Visibly Linear Dynamic Logic
We introduce Visibly Linear Dynamic Logic (VLDL), which extends Linear
Temporal Logic (LTL) by temporal operators that are guarded by visibly pushdown
languages over finite words. In VLDL one can, e.g., express that a function
resets a variable to its original value after its execution, even in the
presence of an unbounded number of intermediate recursive calls. We prove that
VLDL describes exactly the -visibly pushdown languages. Thus it is
strictly more expressive than LTL and able to express recursive properties of
programs with unbounded call stacks.
The main technical contribution of this work is a translation of VLDL into
-visibly pushdown automata of exponential size via one-way alternating
jumping automata. This translation yields exponential-time algorithms for
satisfiability, validity, and model checking. We also show that visibly
pushdown games with VLDL winning conditions are solvable in triply-exponential
time. We prove all these problems to be complete for their respective
complexity classes.Comment: 25 Page
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