On the Borel Inseparability of Game Tree Languages

The game tree languages can be viewed as an automata-theoretic counterpart of parity games on graphs. They witness the strictness of the index hierarchy of alternating tree automata, as well as the fixed-point hierarchy over binary trees. We consider a game tree language of the first non-trivial level, where Eve can force that 0 repeats from some moment on, and its dual, where Adam can force that 1 repeats from some moment on. Both these sets (which amount to one up to an obvious renaming) are complete in the class of co-analytic sets. We show that they cannot be separated by any Borel set, hence {\em a fortiori} by any weakly definable set of trees. This settles a case left open by L.Santocanale and A.Arnold, who have thoroughly investigated the separation property within the $\mu$-calculus and the automata index hierarchies. They showed that separability fails in general for non-deterministic automata of type $\Sigma^{\mu}_{n}$, starting from level $n=3$, while our result settles the missing case $n=2$

Weak index versus Borel rank

We investigate weak recognizability of deterministic languages of infinite trees. We prove that for deterministic languages the Borel hierarchy and the weak index hierarchy coincide. Furthermore, we propose a procedure computing for a deterministic automaton an equivalent minimal index weak automaton with a quadratic number of states. The algorithm works within the time of solving the emptiness problem

The Infimum Problem as a Generalization of the Inclusion Problem for Automata

This thesis is concerned with automata over infinite trees. They are given a labeled infinite tree and accept or reject this tree based on its labels. A generalization of these automata with binary decisions are weighted automata. They do not just decide 'yes' or 'no', but rather compute an arbitrary value from a given algebraic structure, e.g., a semiring or a lattice. When passing from unweighted to weighted formalisms, many problems can be translated accordingly. The purpose of this work is to determine the feasibility of solving the inclusion problem for automata on infinite trees and its generalization to weighted automata, the infimum aggregation problem

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

Exploiting the Temporal Logic Hierarchy and the Non-Confluence Property for Efficient LTL Synthesis

The classic approaches to synthesize a reactive system from a linear temporal logic (LTL) specification first translate the given LTL formula to an equivalent omega-automaton and then compute a winning strategy for the corresponding omega-regular game. To this end, the obtained omega-automata have to be (pseudo)-determinized where typically a variant of Safra's determinization procedure is used. In this paper, we show that this determinization step can be significantly improved for tool implementations by replacing Safra's determinization by simpler determinization procedures. In particular, we exploit (1) the temporal logic hierarchy that corresponds to the well-known automata hierarchy consisting of safety, liveness, Buechi, and co-Buechi automata as well as their boolean closures, (2) the non-confluence property of omega-automata that result from certain translations of LTL formulas, and (3) symbolic implementations of determinization procedures for the Rabin-Scott and the Miyano-Hayashi breakpoint construction. In particular, we present convincing experimental results that demonstrate the practical applicability of our new synthesis procedure