49,451 research outputs found
Parameterized Two-Player Nash Equilibrium
We study the computation of Nash equilibria in a two-player normal form game
from the perspective of parameterized complexity. Recent results proved
hardness for a number of variants, when parameterized by the support size. We
complement those results, by identifying three cases in which the problem
becomes fixed-parameter tractable. These cases occur in the previously studied
settings of sparse games and unbalanced games as well as in the newly
considered case of locally bounded treewidth games that generalizes both these
two cases
Banach spaces without minimal subspaces
We prove three new dichotomies for Banach spaces \`a la W.T. Gowers'
dichotomies. The three dichotomies characterise respectively the spaces having
no minimal subspaces, having no subsequentially minimal basic sequences, and
having no subspaces crudely finitely representable in all of their subspaces.
We subsequently use these results to make progress on Gowers' program of
classifying Banach spaces by finding characteristic spaces present in every
space. Also, the results are used to embed any partial order of size
into the subspaces of any space without a minimal subspace ordered by
isomorphic embeddability
Infinite Matroids and Determinacy of Games
Solving a problem of Diestel and Pott, we construct a large class of infinite
matroids. These can be used to provide counterexamples against the natural
extension of the Well-quasi-ordering-Conjecture to infinite matroids and to
show that the class of planar infinite matroids does not have a universal
matroid.
The existence of these matroids has a connection to Set Theory in that it
corresponds to the Determinacy of certain games. To show that our construction
gives matroids, we introduce a new very simple axiomatization of the class of
countable tame matroids
Index problems for game automata
For a given regular language of infinite trees, one can ask about the minimal
number of priorities needed to recognize this language with a
non-deterministic, alternating, or weak alternating parity automaton. These
questions are known as, respectively, the non-deterministic, alternating, and
weak Rabin-Mostowski index problems. Whether they can be answered effectively
is a long-standing open problem, solved so far only for languages recognizable
by deterministic automata (the alternating variant trivializes).
We investigate a wider class of regular languages, recognizable by so-called
game automata, which can be seen as the closure of deterministic ones under
complementation and composition. Game automata are known to recognize languages
arbitrarily high in the alternating Rabin-Mostowski index hierarchy; that is,
the alternating index problem does not trivialize any more.
Our main contribution is that all three index problems are decidable for
languages recognizable by game automata. Additionally, we show that it is
decidable whether a given regular language can be recognized by a game
automaton
Biases in human behavior
The paper shows that biases in individualâs decision-making may result from the process of mental editing by which subjects produce a ârepresentationâ of the decision problem. During this process, individuals make systematic use of default classifications in order to reduce the short-term memory load and the complexity of symbolic manipulation. The result is the construction of an imperfect mental representation of the problem that nevertheless has the advantage of being simple, and yielding âsatisficingâ decisions. The imperfection origins in a trade-off that exists between the simplicity of representation of a strategy and his efficiency. To obtain simplicity, the strategyâs rules have to be memorized and represented with some degree of abstraction, that allow to drastically reduce their number. Raising the level of abstraction with which a strategyâs rule is represented, means to extend the domain of validity of the rule beyond the field in which the rule has been experimented, and may therefore induce to include unintentionally domains in which the rule is inefficient. Therefore the rise of errors in the mental representation of a problem may be the "natural" effect of the categorization and the identification of the building blocks of a strategy. The biases may be persistent and give rise to lock-in effect, in which individuals remain trapped in sub-optimal strategies, as it is proved by experimental results on stability of sub-optimal strategies in games like Target The Two. To understand why sub-optimal strategies, that embody errors, are locally stable, i.e. cannot be improved by small changes in the rules, it is considered Kauffmanâ NK model, because, among other properties, it shows that if there are interdependencies among the rules of a system, than the system admits many sub-optimal solutions that are locally stable, i.e. cannot be improved by simple mutations. But the fitness function in NK model is a random one, while in our context it is more reasonable to define the fitness of a strategy as efficiency of the program. If we introduce this kind of fitness, then the stability properties of the NK model do not hold any longer: the paper shows that while the elementary statements of a strategy are interdependent, it is possible to achieve an optimal configuration of the strategy via mutations and in consequence the sub-optimal solutions are not locally stable under mutations. The paper therefore provides a different explanation of the existence and stability of suboptimal strategies, based on the difficulty to redefine the sub-problems that constitute the building blocks of the problemâs representation
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