On the Expressive Power of Higher-Order Pushdown Systems

Abstract

We show that deterministic collapsible pushdown automata of second order can recognize a language that is not recognizable by any deterministic higher-order pushdown automaton (without collapse) of any order. This implies that there exists a tree generated by a second order collapsible pushdown system (equivalently, by a recursion scheme of second order) that is not generated by any deterministic higher-order pushdown system (without collapse) of any order (equivalently, by any safe recursion scheme of any order). As a side effect, we present a pumping lemma for deterministic higher-order pushdown automata, which potentially can be useful for other applications.

References in corpus (2)

• Complexity of Model Checking Recursion Schemes for Fragments of the Modal Mu-Calculus
• Higher-Order Pushdown Systems with Data

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Cost Automata, Safe Schemes, and Downward Closures