The complexity of parity games is a long standing open problem that saw a
major breakthrough in 2017 when two quasi-polynomial algorithms were published.
This article presents a third, independent approach to solving parity games in
quasi-polynomial time, based on the notion of register game, a parameterised
variant of a parity game. The analysis of register games leads to a
quasi-polynomial algorithm for parity games, a polynomial algorithm for
restricted classes of parity games and a novel measure of complexity, the
register index, which aims to capture the combined complexity of the priority
assignement and the underlying game graph.
We further present a translation of alternating parity word automata into
alternating weak automata with only a quasi-polynomial increase in size, based
on register games; this improves on the previous exponential translation.
We also use register games to investigate the parity index hierarchy: while
for words the index hierarchy of alternating parity automata collapses to the
weak level, and for trees it is strict, for structures between trees and words,
it collapses logarithmically, in the sense that any parity tree automaton of
size n is equivalent, on these particular classes of structures, to an
automaton with a number of priorities logarithmic in n
