247 research outputs found
Approximate Equilibria in Non-constant-sum Colonel Blotto and Lottery Blotto Games with Large Numbers of Battlefields
In the Colonel Blotto game, two players with a fixed budget simultaneously allocate their resources across n battlefields to maximize the aggregate value gained from the battlefields where they have the higher allocation. Despite its long-standing history and important applicability, the Colonel Blotto game still lacks a complete Nash equilibrium characterization in its most general form-the non-constant-sum version with asymmetric players and heterogeneous battlefields. In this work, we propose a simply-constructed class of strategies-the independently uniform strategies-and we prove them to be approximate equilibria of the non-constant-sum Colonel Blotto game; moreover, we also characterize the approximation error according to the game's parameters. We also introduce an extension called the Lottery Blotto game, with stochastic winner-determination rules allowing more flexibility in modeling practical contexts. We prove that the proposed strategies are also approximate equilibria of the Lottery Blotto game
Characterizing the interplay between information and strength in Blotto games
In this paper, we investigate informational asymmetries in the Colonel Blotto
game, a game-theoretic model of competitive resource allocation between two
players over a set of battlefields. The battlefield valuations are subject to
randomness. One of the two players knows the valuations with certainty. The
other knows only a distribution on the battlefield realizations. However, the
informed player has fewer resources to allocate. We characterize unique
equilibrium payoffs in a two battlefield setup of the Colonel Blotto game. We
then focus on a three battlefield setup in the General Lotto game, a popular
variant of the Colonel Blotto game. We characterize the unique equilibrium
payoffs and mixed equilibrium strategies. We quantify the value of information
- the difference in equilibrium payoff between the asymmetric information game
and complete information game. We find information strictly improves the
informed player's performance guarantee. However, the magnitude of improvement
varies with the informed player's strength as well as the game parameters. Our
analysis highlights the interplay between strength and information in
adversarial environments.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for presentation at 58th Conference on
Decision and Control (CDC), 201
Generalized Colonel Blotto Game
Competitive resource allocation between adversarial decision makers arises in
a wide spectrum of real-world applications such as in communication systems,
cyber-physical systems security, as well as financial, political, and electoral
competition. As such, developing analytical tools to model and analyze
competitive resource allocation is crucial for devising optimal allocation
strategies and anticipating the potential outcomes of the competition. To this
end, the Colonel Blotto game is one of the most popular game-theoretic
frameworks for modeling and analyzing such competitive resource allocation
problems. However, in many real-world competitive situations, the Colonel
Blotto game does not admit solutions in deterministic strategies and, hence,
one must rely on analytically complex mixed-strategies with their associated
tractability, applicability, and practicality challenges. In this paper, a
generalization of the Colonel Blotto game which enables the derivation of
deterministic, practical, and implementable equilibrium strategies is proposed
while accounting for the heterogeneity of the battlefields. In addition, the
proposed generalized game enables accounting for the consumed resources in each
battlefield, a feature that is not considered in the classical Blotto game. For
the generalized game, the existence of a Nash equilibrium in pure-strategies is
shown. Then, closed-form analytical expressions of the equilibrium strategies,
are derived and the outcome of the game is characterized; based on the number
of resources of each player as well as the valuation of each battlefield. The
generated results provide invaluable insights on the outcome of the
competition. For example, the results show that, when both players are fully
rational, the more resourceful player can achieve a better total payoff at the
Nash equilibrium, a result that is not mimicked in the classical Blotto game.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure
Conflicts with Multiple Battlefields
This paper examines conflicts in which performance is measured by the players' success or failure in multiple component conflicts, commonly termed "battlefields." In multi-battlefield conflicts, behavioral linkages across battlefields depend both on the technologies of conflict within each battlefield and the nature of economies or diseconomies in how battlefield out- comes and costs aggregate in determining payoffs in the overall conflict.Con
ict, Contest, Battleeld, Colonel Blotto Game, Auction, Lottery
Conflicts with Multiple Battlefields
This paper examines conflicts in which performance is measured by the players' success or failure in multiple component conflicts, commonly termed âbattlefieldsâ. In multi-battlefield conflicts, behavioral linkages across battlefields depend both on the technologies of conflict within each battlefield and the nature of economies or diseconomies in how battlefield out-comes and costs aggregate in determining payoffs in the overall conflict.conflict, contest, battlefield, Colonel Blotto Game, auction, lottery
Path Planning Problems with Side Observations-When Colonels Play Hide-and-Seek
Resource allocation games such as the famous Colonel Blotto (CB) and
Hide-and-Seek (HS) games are often used to model a large variety of practical
problems, but only in their one-shot versions. Indeed, due to their extremely
large strategy space, it remains an open question how one can efficiently learn
in these games. In this work, we show that the online CB and HS games can be
cast as path planning problems with side-observations (SOPPP): at each stage, a
learner chooses a path on a directed acyclic graph and suffers the sum of
losses that are adversarially assigned to the corresponding edges; and she then
receives semi-bandit feedback with side-observations (i.e., she observes the
losses on the chosen edges plus some others). We propose a novel algorithm,
EXP3-OE, the first-of-its-kind with guaranteed efficient running time for SOPPP
without requiring any auxiliary oracle. We provide an expected-regret bound of
EXP3-OE in SOPPP matching the order of the best benchmark in the literature.
Moreover, we introduce additional assumptions on the observability model under
which we can further improve the regret bounds of EXP3-OE. We illustrate the
benefit of using EXP3-OE in SOPPP by applying it to the online CB and HS games.Comment: Previously, this work appeared as arXiv:1911.09023 which was
mistakenly submitted as a new article (has been submitted to be withdrawn).
This is a preprint of the work published in Proceedings of the 34th AAAI
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI
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