The class of visibly pushdown languages has been recently defined as a subclass of context-free languages with desirable closure properties and tractable decision problems. We study visibly pushdown games, which are games played on visibly pushdown systems where the winning condition is given by a visibly pushdown language. We establish that, unlike pushdown games with pushdown winning conditions, visibly pushdown games are decidable and are 2Exptime-complete. We also show that pushdown games against Ltl specifications and Caret specifications are 3Exptime-complete. Finally, we establish the topological complexity of visibly pushdown languages by showing that they are a subclass of Boolean combinations of Σ3 sets. This leads to an alternative proof that visibly pushdown automata are not determinizable and also shows that visibly pushdown games are determined.
Christof Löding, P. Madhusudan, Olivier Serre