Positional $\omega$-regular languages
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
2026-03-11 v4 Computer Science and Game Theory
Logic in Computer Science
Abstract
In the context of two-player games over graphs, a language is called positional if, in all games using as winning objective, the protagonist can play optimally using positional strategies, that is, strategies that do not depend on the history of the play. In this work, we describe the class of parity automata recognising positional languages, providing a complete characterisation of positionality for -regular languages. As corollaries, we establish decidability of positionality in polynomial time, finite-to-infinite and 1-to-2-players lifts, and show the closure under union of prefix-independent positional objectives, answering a conjecture by Kopczy\'nski in the -regular case.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2401.15384,
title = {Positional $\omega$-regular languages},
author = {Antonio Casares and Pierre Ohlmann},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.15384},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
109 pages. This is the TheoretiCS journal version