16,485 research outputs found
An Upper Bound on the Complexity of Recognizable Tree Languages
The third author noticed in his 1992 PhD Thesis [Sim92] that every regular
tree language of infinite trees is in a class
for some natural number , where is the game quantifier. We
first give a detailed exposition of this result. Next, using an embedding of
the Wadge hierarchy of non self-dual Borel subsets of the Cantor space
into the class , and the notions of Wadge degree
and Veblen function, we argue that this upper bound on the topological
complexity of regular tree languages is much better than the usual
Trees over Infinite Structures and Path Logics with Synchronization
We provide decidability and undecidability results on the model-checking
problem for infinite tree structures. These tree structures are built from
sequences of elements of infinite relational structures. More precisely, we
deal with the tree iteration of a relational structure M in the sense of
Shelah-Stupp. In contrast to classical results where model-checking is shown
decidable for MSO-logic, we show decidability of the tree model-checking
problem for logics that allow only path quantifiers and chain quantifiers
(where chains are subsets of paths), as they appear in branching time logics;
however, at the same time the tree is enriched by the equal-level relation
(which holds between vertices u, v if they are on the same tree level). We
separate cleanly the tree logic from the logic used for expressing properties
of the underlying structure M. We illustrate the scope of the decidability
results by showing that two slight extensions of the framework lead to
undecidability. In particular, this applies to the (stronger) tree iteration in
the sense of Muchnik-Walukiewicz.Comment: In Proceedings INFINITY 2011, arXiv:1111.267
The separation problem for regular languages by piecewise testable languages
Separation is a classical problem in mathematics and computer science. It
asks whether, given two sets belonging to some class, it is possible to
separate them by another set of a smaller class. We present and discuss the
separation problem for regular languages. We then give a direct polynomial time
algorithm to check whether two given regular languages are separable by a
piecewise testable language, that is, whether a sentence can
witness that the languages are indeed disjoint. The proof is a reformulation
and a refinement of an algebraic argument already given by Almeida and the
second author
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
- …