Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

This talk will focus on tree automata, which are tools to analyze existential monadic second order properties of rooted trees. A tree automaton A consists of a finite set \Sigma of colours, and a map \Gamma: \mathbb{N}^\Sigma \rightarrow \Sigma. Given a rooted tree T and a colouring \omega: V(T) \rightarrow \Sigma, we call \omega compatible with automaton A if for every v \in V(T), we have \omega(v) = \Gamma(\vec{n}), where \vec{n} = (n_\sigma: \sigma \in \Sigma) and n_\sigma is the number of children of v with colour \sigma. Under the Galton-Watson branching process set-up, if p_\sigma denotes the probability that a node is coloured \sigma, then \vec{p} = (p_\sigma: \sigma \in \Sigma) is obtained as a fixed point of a system of equations. But this system need not have a unique fixed point. Our question attempts to answer whether a fixed point of such a system simply arises out of analytic reasons, or if it admits of a probabilistic interpretation. I shall formally defined interpretation, and provide a nearly complete description of necessary and sufficient conditions for a fixed point to not admit an interpretation, in which case it is called rogue.Joint work with Tobias Johnson and Fiona Skerman.