Symmetric Strategy Improvement

Symmetry is inherent in the definition of most of the two-player zero-sum games, including parity, mean-payoff, and discounted-payoff games. It is therefore quite surprising that no symmetric analysis techniques for these games exist. We develop a novel symmetric strategy improvement algorithm where, in each iteration, the strategies of both players are improved simultaneously. We show that symmetric strategy improvement defies Friedmann's traps, which shook the belief in the potential of classic strategy improvement to be polynomial

An Exponential Lower Bound for the Latest Deterministic Strategy Iteration Algorithms

This paper presents a new exponential lower bound for the two most popular deterministic variants of the strategy improvement algorithms for solving parity, mean payoff, discounted payoff and simple stochastic games. The first variant improves every node in each step maximizing the current valuation locally, whereas the second variant computes the globally optimal improvement in each step. We outline families of games on which both variants require exponentially many strategy iterations

Succinct progress measures for solving parity games

The recent breakthrough paper by Calude et al. has given the first algorithm for solving parity games in quasi-polynomial time, where previously the best algorithms were mildly subexponential. We devise an alternative quasi-polynomial time algorithm based on progress measures, which allows us to reduce the space required from quasi-polynomial to nearly linear. Our key technical tools are a novel concept of ordered tree coding, and a succinct tree coding result that we prove using bounded adaptive multi-counters, both of which are interesting in their own right

Parity and Streett Games with Costs

We consider two-player games played on finite graphs equipped with costs on edges and introduce two winning conditions, cost-parity and cost-Streett, which require bounds on the cost between requests and their responses. Both conditions generalize the corresponding classical omega-regular conditions and the corresponding finitary conditions. For parity games with costs we show that the first player has positional winning strategies and that determining the winner lies in NP and coNP. For Streett games with costs we show that the first player has finite-state winning strategies and that determining the winner is EXPTIME-complete. The second player might need infinite memory in both games. Both types of games with costs can be solved by solving linearly many instances of their classical variants.Comment: A preliminary version of this work appeared in FSTTCS 2012 under the name "Cost-parity and Cost-Streett Games". The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreements 259454 (GALE) and 239850 (SOSNA

A Delayed Promotion Policy for Parity Games

Parity games are two-player infinite-duration games on graphs that play a crucial role in various fields of theoretical computer science. Finding efficient algorithms to solve these games in practice is widely acknowledged as a core problem in formal verification, as it leads to efficient solutions of the model-checking and satisfiability problems of expressive temporal logics, e.g., the modal muCalculus. Their solution can be reduced to the problem of identifying sets of positions of the game, called dominions, in each of which a player can force a win by remaining in the set forever. Recently, a novel technique to compute dominions, called priority promotion, has been proposed, which is based on the notions of quasi dominion, a relaxed form of dominion, and dominion space. The underlying framework is general enough to accommodate different instantiations of the solution procedure, whose correctness is ensured by the nature of the space itself. In this paper we propose a new such instantiation, called delayed promotion, that tries to reduce the possible exponential behaviours exhibited by the original method in the worst case. The resulting procedure not only often outperforms the original priority promotion approach, but so far no exponential worst case is known.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2016, arXiv:1609.0364

Formats of Winning Strategies for Six Types of Pushdown Games

The solution of parity games over pushdown graphs (Walukiewicz '96) was the first step towards an effective theory of infinite-state games. It was shown that winning strategies for pushdown games can be implemented again as pushdown automata. We continue this study and investigate the connection between game presentations and winning strategies in altogether six cases of game arenas, among them realtime pushdown systems, visibly pushdown systems, and counter systems. In four cases we show by a uniform proof method that we obtain strategies implementable by the same type of pushdown machine as given in the game arena. We prove that for the two remaining cases this correspondence fails. In the conclusion we address the question of an abstract criterion that explains the results

Energy Parity Games

Energy parity games are infinite two-player turn-based games played on weighted graphs. The objective of the game combines a (qualitative) parity condition with the (quantitative) requirement that the sum of the weights (i.e., the level of energy in the game) must remain positive. Beside their own interest in the design and synthesis of resource-constrained omega-regular specifications, energy parity games provide one of the simplest model of games with combined qualitative and quantitative objective. Our main results are as follows: (a) exponential memory is necessary and sufficient for winning strategies in energy parity games; (b) the problem of deciding the winner in energy parity games can be solved in NP \cap coNP; and (c) we give an algorithm to solve energy parity by reduction to energy games. We also show that the problem of deciding the winner in energy parity games is polynomially equivalent to the problem of deciding the winner in mean-payoff parity games, while optimal strategies may require infinite memory in mean-payoff parity games. As a consequence we obtain a conceptually simple algorithm to solve mean-payoff parity games

The Fixpoint-Iteration Algorithm for Parity Games

It is known that the model checking problem for the modal mu-calculus reduces to the problem of solving a parity game and vice-versa. The latter is realised by the Walukiewicz formulas which are satisfied by a node in a parity game iff player 0 wins the game from this node. Thus, they define her winning region, and any model checking algorithm for the modal mu-calculus, suitably specialised to the Walukiewicz formulas, yields an algorithm for solving parity games. In this paper we study the effect of employing the most straight-forward mu-calculus model checking algorithm: fixpoint iteration. This is also one of the few algorithms, if not the only one, that were not originally devised for parity game solving already. While an empirical study quickly shows that this does not yield an algorithm that works well in practice, it is interesting from a theoretical point for two reasons: first, it is exponential on virtually all families of games that were designed as lower bounds for very particular algorithms suggesting that fixpoint iteration is connected to all those. Second, fixpoint iteration does not compute positional winning strategies. Note that the Walukiewicz formulas only define winning regions; some additional work is needed in order to make this algorithm compute winning strategies. We show that these are particular exponential-space strategies which we call eventually-positional, and we show how positional ones can be extracted from them.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2014, arXiv:1408.556