938 research outputs found
The Rabin index of parity games
We study the descriptive complexity of parity games by taking into account
the coloring of their game graphs whilst ignoring their ownership structure.
Colored game graphs are identified if they determine the same winning regions
and strategies, for all ownership structures of nodes. The Rabin index of a
parity game is the minimum of the maximal color taken over all equivalent
coloring functions. We show that deciding whether the Rabin index is at least k
is in PTIME for k=1 but NP-hard for all fixed k > 1. We present an EXPTIME
algorithm that computes the Rabin index by simplifying its input coloring
function. When replacing simple cycle with cycle detection in that algorithm,
its output over-approximates the Rabin index in polynomial time. Experimental
results show that this approximation yields good values in practice.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2013, arXiv:1307.416
Determinising Parity Automata
Parity word automata and their determinisation play an important role in
automata and game theory. We discuss a determinisation procedure for
nondeterministic parity automata through deterministic Rabin to deterministic
parity automata. We prove that the intermediate determinisation to Rabin
automata is optimal. We show that the resulting determinisation to parity
automata is optimal up to a small constant. Moreover, the lower bound refers to
the more liberal Streett acceptance. We thus show that determinisation to
Streett would not lead to better bounds than determinisation to parity. As a
side-result, this optimality extends to the determinisation of B\"uchi
automata
Unambiguous Languages Exhaust the Index Hierarchy
This work is a study of the expressive power of unambiguity in the case of automata over infinite trees. An automaton is called unambiguous if it has at most one accepting run on every input, the language of such an automaton is called an unambiguous language. It is known that not every regular language of infinite trees is unambiguous. Except that, very little is known about which regular tree languages are unambiguous.
This paper answers the question whether unambiguous languages are of bounded complexity among all regular tree languages. The notion of complexity is the canonical one, called the (parity or Rabin/Mostowski) index hierarchy. The answer is negative, as exhibited by a family of examples of unambiguous languages the cannot be recognised by any alternating parity tree automata of bounded range of priorities.
Hardness of the examples is based on the theory of signatures, previously studied by Walukiewicz. The technical core of the article is a definition of the canonical signatures together with a parity game that compares signatures of a given pair of parity games (of the same index)
Can Nondeterminism Help Complementation?
Complementation and determinization are two fundamental notions in automata
theory. The close relationship between the two has been well observed in the
literature. In the case of nondeterministic finite automata on finite words
(NFA), complementation and determinization have the same state complexity,
namely Theta(2^n) where n is the state size. The same similarity between
determinization and complementation was found for Buchi automata, where both
operations were shown to have 2^\Theta(n lg n) state complexity. An intriguing
question is whether there exists a type of omega-automata whose determinization
is considerably harder than its complementation. In this paper, we show that
for all common types of omega-automata, the determinization problem has the
same state complexity as the corresponding complementation problem at the
granularity of 2^\Theta(.).Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2012, arXiv:1210.202
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 -calculus and the automata index hierarchies. They
showed that separability fails in general for non-deterministic automata of
type , starting from level , while our result settles
the missing case
Pure Nash Equilibria in Concurrent Deterministic Games
We study pure-strategy Nash equilibria in multi-player concurrent
deterministic games, for a variety of preference relations. We provide a novel
construction, called the suspect game, which transforms a multi-player
concurrent game into a two-player turn-based game which turns Nash equilibria
into winning strategies (for some objective that depends on the preference
relations of the players in the original game). We use that transformation to
design algorithms for computing Nash equilibria in finite games, which in most
cases have optimal worst-case complexity, for large classes of preference
relations. This includes the purely qualitative framework, where each player
has a single omega-regular objective that she wants to satisfy, but also the
larger class of semi-quantitative objectives, where each player has several
omega-regular objectives equipped with a preorder (for instance, a player may
want to satisfy all her objectives, or to maximise the number of objectives
that she achieves.)Comment: 72 page
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
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