Positional Games and QBF: The Corrective Encoding

Positional games are a mathematical class of two-player games comprising Tic-tac-toe and its generalizations. We propose a novel encoding of these games into Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBF) such that a game instance admits a winning strategy for first player if and only if the corresponding formula is true. Our approach improves over previous QBF encodings of games in multiple ways. First, it is generic and lets us encode other positional games, such as Hex. Second, structural properties of positional games together with a careful treatment of illegal moves let us generate more compact instances that can be solved faster by state-of-the-art QBF solvers. We establish the latter fact through extensive experiments. Finally, the compactness of our new encoding makes it feasible to translate realistic game problems. We identify a few such problems of historical significance and put them forward to the QBF community as milestones of increasing difficulty.Comment: Accepted for publication in the 23rd International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT2020

Stochastic Games with Disjunctions of Multiple Objectives (Technical Report)

Stochastic games combine controllable and adversarial non-determinism with stochastic behavior and are a common tool in control, verification and synthesis of reactive systems facing uncertainty. Multi-objective stochastic games are natural in situations where several - possibly conflicting - performance criteria like time and energy consumption are relevant. Such conjunctive combinations are the most studied multi-objective setting in the literature. In this paper, we consider the dual disjunctive problem. More concretely, we study turn-based stochastic two-player games on graphs where the winning condition is to guarantee at least one reachability or safety objective from a given set of alternatives. We present a fine-grained overview of strategy and computational complexity of such \emph{disjunctive queries} (DQs) and provide new lower and upper bounds for several variants of the problem, significantly extending previous works. We also propose a novel value iteration-style algorithm for approximating the set of Pareto optimal thresholds for a given DQ.Comment: Technical report including appendix with detailed proofs, 29 page