A gap property of deterministic tree languages

AbstractWe show that a tree language recognized by a deterministic parity automaton is either hard for the co-Büchi level and therefore cannot be recognized by a weak alternating automaton, or is on a very low level in the hierarchy of weak alternating automata. A topological counterpart of this property is that a deterministic tree language is either Π11 complete (and hence nonBorel), or it is on the level Π30 of the Borel hierarchy. We also give a new simple proof of the strictness of the hierarchy of weak alternating automata