Visibly Pushdown Games

Christof Loeding (1) , Parthasarathy Madhusudan (2) , Olivier Serre (1)

1 LIAFA - Laboratoire d'informatique Algorithmique : Fondements et Applications
2 CIS - Department of Computer and Information Science [Pennsylvania]

The class of visibly pushdown languages has been recently defined as a subclass of context-free languages with desirable closure properties and tractable decision problems. We study visibly pushdown games, which are games played on visibly pushdown systems where the winning condition is given by a visibly pushdown language. We establish that, unlike pushdown games with pushdown winning conditions, visibly pushdown games are decidable and are 2Exptime-complete. We also show that pushdown games against Ltl specifications and Caret speciØcations are 3Exptime-complete. Finally, we establish the topological complexity of visibly pushdown languages by showing that they are a subclass of Boolean combinations of Sigma_3 sets. This leads to an alternative proof that visibly pushdown automata are not determinizable and also shows that visibly pushdown games are determined.

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Christof Loeding, Parthasarathy Madhusudan, Olivier Serre. Visibly Pushdown Games. FST TCS 2004: Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, 24th Conference, 2004, Chennai, India. pp.408-420. ⟨hal-00012137⟩