Universal Algorithms for Parity Games and Nested Fixpoints

An attractor decomposition meta-algorithm for solving parity games is given that generalises the classic McNaughton-Zielonka algorithm and its recent quasi-polynomial variants due to Parys (2019), and to Lehtinen, Schewe, and Wojtczak (2019). The central concepts studied and exploited are attractor decompositions of dominia in parity games and the ordered trees that describe the inductive structure of attractor decompositions. The universal algorithm yields McNaughton-Zielonka, Parys, and Lehtinen-Schewe-Wojtczak algorithms as special cases when suitable universal trees are given to it as inputs. The main technical results provide a unified proof of correctness and structural insights into those algorithms. Suitably adapting the universal algorithm for parity games to fixpoint games gives a quasi-polynomial time algorithm to compute nested fixpoints over finite complete lattices. The universal algorithms for parity games and nested fixpoints can be implemented symbolically. It is shown how this can be done with $O(\lg d)$ symbolic space complexity, improving the $O(d \lg n)$ symbolic space complexity achieved by Chatterjee, Dvořák, Henzinger, and Svozil (2018) for parity games, where $n$ is the number of vertices and $d$ is the number of distinct priorities in a parity game.