The rabin index of parity games

Abstract

We study the descriptive complexity of parity games by taking into account the coloring of their game graphs whilst ignoring their owner- ship structure. Di erent colorings of the same graph are identi ed if they determine the same winning regions and strategies, for all ownership structures of nodes. The Rabin index of a parity game is the minimum of the maximal color taken over all equivalent coloring functions. We show that deciding whether the Rabin index is at least k is in P for k = 1 but NP-hard for all xed k 2. We present an EXPTIME algorithm that computes the Rabin index by simplifying its input coloring function. When replacing simple cycle with cycle detection in that algorithm, its output over-approximates the Rabin index in polynomial time. Experi- mental results show that this approximation yields good values in practice