The Emptiness and Complementation Problems for Automata on Infinite Trees

Abstract

In [6] Rabin defines Automata on Infinite Trees, and the body of that paper is concerned with proving two theorems about these automata. The result we consider in the first chapter says that there exists an effective procedure to determine, given an automaton on infinite trees, whether or not it accepts anything at all. We present a new decision procedure which is much simpler than Rabin's since we do not use an induction argument as he does.