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This paper discusses the hardness of finding minimal good-for-games (GFG) Buchi, Co-Buchi, and parity automata with state based acceptance. The problem appears to sit between finding small deterministic and finding small nondeterministic automata, where minimality is NP-complete and PSPACE-complete, respectively. However, recent work of Radi and Kupferman has shown that minimising Co-Buchi automata with transition based acceptance is tractable, which suggests that the complexity of minimising GFG automata might be cheaper than minimising deterministic automata. We show for the standard state based acceptance that the minimality of a GFG automaton is NP-complete for Buchi, Co-Buchi, and parity GFG automata. The proofs are a surprisingly straight forward generalisation of the proofs from deterministic Buchi automata: they use a similar reductions, and the same hard class of languages.
In GFG automata, it is possible to resolve nondeterminism in a way that only depends on the past and still accepts all the words in the language. The motivation for GFG automata comes from their adequacy for games and synthesis, wherein general nondeterminism is inappropriate. We continue the ongoing effort of studying the power of nondeterminism in GFG automata. Initial indications have hinted that every GFG automaton embodies a deterministic one. Today we know that this is not the case, and in fact GFG automata may be exponentially more succinct than deterministic ones. We focus on the typeness question, namely the question of whether a GFG automaton with a certain acceptance condition has an equivalent GFG automaton with a weaker acceptance condition on the same structure. Beyond the theoretical interest in studying typeness, its existence implies efficient translations among different acceptance conditions. This practical issue is of special interest in the context of games, where the Buchi and co-Buchi conditions admit memoryless strategies for both players. Typeness is known to hold for deterministic automata and not to hold for general nondeterministic automata. We show that GFG automata enjoy the benefits of typeness, similarly to the case of deterministic automata. In particular, when Rabin or Streett GFG automata have equivalent Buchi or co-Buchi GFG automata, respectively, then such equivalent automata can be defined on a substructure of the original automata. Using our typeness results, we further study the place of GFG automata in between deterministic and nondeterministic ones. Specifically, considering automata complementation, we show that GFG automata lean toward nondeterministic ones, admitting an exponential state blow-up in the complementation of a Streett automaton into a Rabin automaton, as opposed to the constant blow-up in the deterministic case.
We characterize the class of nondeterministic ${omega}$-automata that can be used for the analysis of finite Markov decision processes (MDPs). We call these automata `good-for-MDPs (GFM). We show that GFM automata are closed under classic simulation as well as under more powerful simulation relations that leverage properties of optimal control strategies for MDPs. This closure enables us to exploit state-space reduction techniques, such as those based on direct and delayed simulation, that guarantee simulation equivalence. We demonstrate the promise of GFM automata by defining a new class of automata with favorable properties - they are Buchi automata with low branching degree obtained through a simple construction - and show that going beyond limit-deterministic automata may significantly benefit reinforcement learning.
In the Nikoli pencil-and-paper game Tatamibari, a puzzle consists of an $m times n$ grid of cells, where each cell possibly contains a clue among +, -, |. The goal is to partition the grid into disjoint rectangles, where every rectangle contains exactly one clue, rectangles containing + are square, rectangles containing - are strictly longer horizontally than vertically, rectangles containing | are strictly longer vertically than horizontally, and no four rectangles share a corner. We prove this puzzle NP-complete, establishing a Nikoli gap of 16 years. Along the way, we introduce a gadget framework for proving hardness of similar puzzles involving area coverage, and show that it applies to an existing NP-hardness proof for Spiral Galaxies. We also present a mathematical puzzle font for Tatamibari.
Rikudo is a number-placement puzzle, where the player is asked to complete a Hamiltonian path on a hexagonal grid, given some clues (numbers already placed and edges of the path). We prove that the game is complete for NP, even if the puzzle has no hole. When all odd numbers are placed it is in P, whereas it is still NP-hard when all numbers of the form $3k+1$ are placed.
Zero automata are a probabilistic extension of parity automata on infinite trees. The satisfiability of a certain probabilistic variant of mso, called tmso + zero, reduces to the emptiness problem for zero automata. We introduce a variant of zero automata called nonzero automata. We prove that for every zero automaton there is an equivalent nonzero automaton of quadratic size and the emptiness problem of nonzero automata is decidable and both in NP and in coNP. These results imply that tmso + zero has decidable satisfiability.