We show that deterministic collapsible pushdown automata of second order can recognize a language that is not recognizable by any deterministic higher-order pushdown automaton (without collapse) of any order. This implies that there exists a tree generated by a second order collapsible pushdown system (equivalently, by a recursion scheme of second order) that is not generated by any deterministic higher-order pushdown system (without collapse) of any order (equivalently, by any safe recursion scheme of any order). As a side effect, we present a pumping lemma for deterministic higher-order pushdown automata, which potentially can be useful for other applications.
Automata-logic connections are pillars of the theory of regular languages. Such connections are harder to obtain for transducers, but important results have been obtained recently for word-to-word transformations, showing that the three following models are equivalent: deterministic two-way transducers, monadic second-order (MSO) transducers, and deterministic one-way automata equipped with a finite number of registers. Nested words are words with a nesting structure, allowing to model unranked trees as their depth-first-search linearisations. In this paper, we consider transformations from ne…
We give a direct polynomial-time reduction from parity games played over the configuration graphs of collapsible pushdown systems to safety games played over the same class of graphs. That a polynomial-time reduction would exist was known since both problems are complete for the same complexity class. Coming up with a direct reduction, however, has been an open problem. Our solution to the puzzle brings together a number of techniques for pushdown games and adds three new ones. This work contributes to a recent trend of liveness to safety reductions which allow the advanced state-of-the-art in…
We study an expressive model of timed pushdown automata extended with modular and fractional clock constraints. We show that the binary reachability relation is effectively expressible in hybrid linear arithmetic with a rational and an integer sort. This subsumes analogous expressibility results previously known for finite and pushdown timed automata with untimed stack. As key technical tools, we use quantifier elimination for a fragment of hybrid linear arithmetic and for cyclic order atoms, and a reduction to register pushdown automata over cyclic order atoms.
This paper studies a large class of two-player perfect-information turn-based parity games on infinite graphs, namely those generated by collapsible pushdown automata. The main motivation for studying these games comes from the connections from collapsible pushdown automata and higher-order recursion schemes, both models being equi-expressive for generating infinite trees. Our main result is to establish the decidability of such games and to provide an effective representation of the winning region as well as of a winning strategy. Thus, the results obtained here provide all necessary tools fo…
Timed pushdown automata (TPDA) are an expressive formalism combining recursion with a rich logic of timing constraints. We prove that reachability relations of TPDA are expressible in linear arithmetic, a rich logic generalising Presburger arithmetic and rational arithmetic. The main technical ingredients are a novel quantifier elimination result for clock constraints (used to simplify the syntax of TPDA transitions), the use of clock difference relations to express reachability relations of the fractional clock values, and an application of Parikh's theorem to reconstruct the integral clock v…
This paper studies the logical properties of a very general class of infinite ranked trees, namely those generated by higher-order recursion schemes. We consider, for both monadic second-order logic and modal mu-calculus, three main problems: model-checking, logical reflection (aka global model-checking, that asks for a finite description of the set of elements for which a formula holds) and selection (that asks, if exists, for some finite description of a set of elements for which an MSO formula with a second-order free variable holds). For each of these problems we provide an effective solut…
We study linear time model checking of collapsible higher-order pushdown systems (CPDS) of order 2 (manipulating stack of stacks) against MSO and PDL (propositional dynamic logic with converse and loop) enhanced with push/pop matching relations. To capture these linear time behaviours with matchings, we propose order-2 nested words. These graphs consist of a word structure augmented with two binary matching relations, one for each order of stack, which relate a push with matching pops (or collapse) on the respective stack. Due to the matching relations, satisfiability and model checking are un…
A non-deterministic recursion scheme recognizes a language of finite trees. This very expressive model can simulate, among others, higher-order pushdown automata with collapse. We show decidability of the diagonal problem for schemes. This result has several interesting consequences. In particular, it gives an algorithm that computes the downward closure of languages of words recognized by schemes. In turn, this has immediate application to separability problems and reachability analysis of concurrent systems.
Floyd's Operator Precedence (OP) languages are a deterministic context-free family having many desirable properties. They are locally and parallely parsable, and languages having a compatible structure are closed under Boolean operations, concatenation and star; they properly include the family of Visibly Pushdown (or Input Driven) languages. OP languages are based on three relations between any two consecutive terminal symbols, which assign syntax structure to words. We extend such relations to k-tuples of consecutive terminal symbols, by using the model of strictly locally testable regular l…
We study the expressive power of Alternating Parity Krivine Automata (APKA), which provide operational semantics to Higher-Order Modal Fixpoint Logic (HFL). APKA consist of ordinary parity automata extended by a variation of the Krivine Abstract Machine. We show that the number and parity of priorities available to an APKA form a proper hierarchy of expressive power as in the modal mu-calculus. This also induces a strict alternation hierarchy on HFL. The proof follows Arnold's (1999) encoding of runs into trees and subsequent use of the Banach Fixpoint Theorem.
It is shown that a higher-dimensional automaton is hhp-bisimilar to the free symmetric HDA generated by it. Consequently, up to hereditary history-preserving bisimilarity, ordinary HDAs and symmetric HDAs are models of concurrency with the same expressive power.
