Title
Games where you can play optimally without any memory
Abstract
Reactive systems are often modelled as two person antagonistic games where one player represents the system while his adversary represents the environment. Undoubtedly, the most popular games in this context are parity games and their cousins (Rabin, Streett and Muller games). Recently however also games with other types of payments, like discounted or mean-payoff [5,6], previously used only in economic context, entered into the area of system modelling and verification. The most outstanding property of parity, mean-payoff and discounted games is the existence of optimal positional (memoryless) strategies for both players. This observation raises two questions: (1) can we characterise the family of payoff mappings for which there always exist optimal positional strategies for both players and (2) are there other payoff mappings with practical or theoretical interest and admitting optimal positional strategies. This paper provides a complete answer to the first question by presenting a simple necessary and sufficient condition on payoff mapping guaranteeing the existence of optimal positional strategies. As a corollary to this result we show the following remarkable property of payoff mappings: if both players have optimal positional strategies when playing solitary one-player games then also they have optimal positional strategies for two-player games.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1007/11539452_33
CONCUR
Keywords
Field
DocType
parity game,optimal positional strategy,discounted game,reactive system,economic context,system modelling,outstanding property,following remarkable property,payoff mapping,muller game
Preference relation,Mathematical economics,Concurrency,Computer science,Theoretical computer science,Game theory,Adversary,Tree automaton,Corollary,Reactive system,Stochastic game
Conference
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
3653
0302-9743
3-540-28309-9
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
27
1.67
10
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hugo Gimbert124921.31
Wieslaw Zielonka261438.95