2,159 research outputs found
Stochastic Games : recent results
Nous présentons des résultats récents sur les jeux stochastiques finis. Ce texte est à paraître dans le Handbook of Game Theory, vol 3., eds. R.J. Aumann et S. HartJeux stochastiques
Hypergraph conditions for the solvability of the ergodic equation for zero-sum games
The ergodic equation is a basic tool in the study of mean-payoff stochastic
games. Its solvability entails that the mean payoff is independent of the
initial state. Moreover, optimal stationary strategies are readily obtained
from its solution. In this paper, we give a general sufficient condition for
the solvability of the ergodic equation, for a game with finite state space but
arbitrary action spaces. This condition involves a pair of directed hypergraphs
depending only on the ``growth at infinity'' of the Shapley operator of the
game. This refines a recent result of the authors which only applied to games
with bounded payments, as well as earlier nonlinear fixed point results for
order preserving maps, involving graph conditions.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, to appear in Proc. 54th IEEE Conference on
Decision and Control (CDC 2015
Two-player games : a reduction
The general idea of the proof is to define a class of sets, the solvable sets, which can safely be thought of as absorbing states.stochastic games; recursive games
Limit Your Consumption! Finding Bounds in Average-energy Games
Energy games are infinite two-player games played in weighted arenas with
quantitative objectives that restrict the consumption of a resource modeled by
the weights, e.g., a battery that is charged and drained. Typically, upper
and/or lower bounds on the battery capacity are part of the problem
description. Here, we consider the problem of determining upper bounds on the
average accumulated energy or on the capacity while satisfying a given lower
bound, i.e., we do not determine whether a given bound is sufficient to meet
the specification, but if there exists a sufficient bound to meet it.
In the classical setting with positive and negative weights, we show that the
problem of determining the existence of a sufficient bound on the long-run
average accumulated energy can be solved in doubly-exponential time. Then, we
consider recharge games: here, all weights are negative, but there are recharge
edges that recharge the energy to some fixed capacity. We show that bounding
the long-run average energy in such games is complete for exponential time.
Then, we consider the existential version of the problem, which turns out to be
solvable in polynomial time: here, we ask whether there is a recharge capacity
that allows the system player to win the game.
We conclude by studying tradeoffs between the memory needed to implement
strategies and the bounds they realize. We give an example showing that memory
can be traded for bounds and vice versa. Also, we show that increasing the
capacity allows to lower the average accumulated energy.Comment: In Proceedings QAPL'16, arXiv:1610.0769
A Probabilistic Approach to Mean Field Games with Major and Minor Players
We propose a new approach to mean field games with major and minor players.
Our formulation involves a two player game where the optimization of the
representative minor player is standard while the major player faces an
optimization over conditional McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations.
The definition of this limiting game is justified by proving that its solution
provides approximate Nash equilibriums for large finite player games. This
proof depends upon the generalization of standard results on the propagation of
chaos to conditional dynamics. Because it is on independent interest, we prove
this generalization in full detail. Using a conditional form of the Pontryagin
stochastic maximum principle (proven in the appendix), we reduce the solution
of the mean field game to a forward-backward system of stochastic differential
equations of the conditional McKean-Vlasov type, which we solve in the Linear
Quadratic setting. We use this class of models to show that Nash equilibriums
in our formulation can be different from those of the formulations contemplated
so far in the literature
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