Selected ideas used for decidability and undecidability of bisimilarity

Abstract

The paper tries to highlight some crucial ideas appearing in the decidability and undecidability proofs for the bisimilarity problem on models originating in language theory, like context-free grammars and pushdown automata. In particular, it focuses on the method of finite bases of bisimulations in the case of decidability and the method of “Defender’s forcing” in the case of undecidability. An intent was to write an easy-to-read article in a slightly informal way, which should nevertheless convey the basic ideas with sufficient precision.