Eliminating recursion in the µ-calculus

  • Authors:
  • Martin Otto

  • Affiliations:
  • RWTH Aachen

  • Venue:
  • STACS'99 Proceedings of the 16th annual conference on Theoretical aspects of computer science
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Consider the following problem: given a formula of the modal µ-calculus, decide whether this formula is equivalently expressible in basic modal logic. It is shown that this problem is decidable, in fact in deterministic exponential time. The decidability result can be obtained through a model theoretic reduction to the monadic second-order theory of the complete binary tree, which by Rabin's classical result is decidable, albeit of non-elementary complexity. An improved analysis based on tree automata yields an exponential time decision procedure.