On the Strength of Unambiguous Tree Automata

Abstract

This work is a study of the class of non-deterministic automata on infinite trees that are unambiguous i.e. have at most one accepting run on every tree. The motivating question asks if the fact that an automaton is unambiguous implies some drop in the descriptive complexity of the language recognised by the automaton. As it turns out, such a drop occurs for the parity index and does not occur for the weak parity index.More precisely, given an unambiguous parity automaton [Formula: see text] of index [Formula: see text], we show how to construct an alternating automaton [Formula: see text] which accepts the same language, but is simpler in terms of the acceptance condition. In particular, if [Formula: see text] is a Büchi automaton ([Formula: see text]) then [Formula: see text] is a weak alternating automaton. In general, [Formula: see text] belongs to the class [Formula: see text], what implies that it is simultaneously of alternating index [Formula: see text] and of the dual index [Formula: see text]. The transformation algorithm is based on a separation procedure of Arnold and Santocanale (2005).In the case of non-deterministic automata with the weak parity condition, we provide a separation procedure analogous to the one used above. However, as illustrated by examples, this separation procedure cannot be used to prove a complexity drop in the weak case, as there is no such drop.