Bounded Rationality in Concurrent Parity Games

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the impact of resource-bounded strategies on the ability of players to win in concurrent parity games, providing a complete characterization of winning sets under various strategy restrictions.

Contribution

It offers a precise, complete characterization of qualitative winning sets for all strategy classes in concurrent parity games, including new insights on strategy power equivalences.

Findings

Uniform memoryless strategies are as powerful as finite-precision infinite-memory strategies.

Infinite-precision memoryless strategies are as powerful as infinite-precision finite-memory strategies.

Winning sets can be computed in polynomial time with symbolic algorithms.

Abstract

We consider 2-player games played on a finite state space for infinite rounds. The games are concurrent: in each round, the two players choose their moves simultaneously; the current state and the moves determine the successor. We consider omega-regular winning conditions given as parity objectives. We consider the qualitative analysis problems: the computation of the almost-sure and limit-sure winning set of states, where player 1 can ensure to win with probability 1 and with probability arbitrarily close to 1, respectively. In general the almost-sure and limit-sure winning strategies require both infinite-memory and infinite-precision. We study the bounded-rationality problem for qualitative analysis of concurrent parity games, where the strategy set player 1 is restricted to bounded-resource strategies. In terms of precision, strategies can be deterministic, uniform, finite-precision or infinite-precision; and in terms of memory, strategies can be memoryless, finite-memory or infinite-memory. We present a precise and complete characterization of the qualitative winning sets for all combinations of classes of strategies. In particular, we show that uniform memoryless strategies are as powerful as finite-precision infinite-memory strategies, and infinite-precision memoryless strategies are as powerful as infinite-precision finite-memory strategies. We show that the winning sets can be computed in O(n^{2d+3}) time, where n is the size of the game and 2d is the number of priorities, and our algorithms are symbolic. The membership problem of whether a state belongs to a winning set can be decided in NP cap coNP. While this complexity is the same as for the simpler class of turn-based games, where in each state only one of the players has a choice of moves, our algorithms, that are obtained by characterization of the winning sets as mu-calculus formulas, are considerably more involved.