5,291 research outputs found
Fatal Attractors in Parity Games: Building Blocks for Partial Solvers
Attractors in parity games are a technical device for solving "alternating"
reachability of given node sets. A well known solver of parity games -
Zielonka's algorithm - uses such attractor computations recursively. We here
propose new forms of attractors that are monotone in that they are aware of
specific static patterns of colors encountered in reaching a given node set in
alternating fashion. Then we demonstrate how these new forms of attractors can
be embedded within greatest fixed-point computations to design solvers of
parity games that run in polynomial time but are partial in that they may not
decide the winning status of all nodes in the input game.
Experimental results show that our partial solvers completely solve
benchmarks that were constructed to challenge existing full solvers. Our
partial solvers also have encouraging run times in practice. For one partial
solver we prove that its run-time is at most cubic in the number of nodes in
the parity game, that its output game is independent of the order in which
monotone attractors are computed, and that it solves all Buechi games and weak
games.
We then define and study a transformation that converts partial solvers into
more precise partial solvers, and we prove that this transformation is sound
under very reasonable conditions on the input partial solvers. Noting that one
of our partial solvers meets these conditions, we apply its transformation on
1.6 million randomly generated games and so experimentally validate that the
transformation can be very effective in increasing the precision of partial
solvers
The Rabin index of parity games
We study the descriptive complexity of parity games by taking into account
the coloring of their game graphs whilst ignoring their ownership structure.
Colored game graphs are identified if they determine the same winning regions
and strategies, for all ownership structures of nodes. The Rabin index of a
parity game is the minimum of the maximal color taken over all equivalent
coloring functions. We show that deciding whether the Rabin index is at least k
is in PTIME for k=1 but NP-hard for all fixed k > 1. We present an EXPTIME
algorithm that computes the Rabin index by simplifying its input coloring
function. When replacing simple cycle with cycle detection in that algorithm,
its output over-approximates the Rabin index in polynomial time. Experimental
results show that this approximation yields good values in practice.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2013, arXiv:1307.416
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