# On Strong Determinacy of Countable Stochastic Games

## TL;DR

This paper investigates the strong determinacy of countably infinite stochastic games, proving almost-sure objectives are strongly determined and identifying limitations for other objectives, with implications for strategy complexity.

## Contribution

It establishes strong determinacy for almost-sure objectives in countably infinite games and shows that some other objectives lack this property, also analyzing strategy types needed.

## Key findings

- Almost-sure objectives are strongly determined.
- /2-Bbuchi objectives are not strongly determined.
- Memoryless deterministic strategies suffice for certain objectives.

## Abstract

We study 2-player turn-based perfect-information stochastic games with countably infinite state space. The players aim at maximizing/minimizing the probability of a given event (i.e., measurable set of infinite plays), such as reachability, B\"uchi, omega-regular or more general objectives. These games are known to be weakly determined, i.e., they have value. However, strong determinacy of threshold objectives (given by an event and a threshold $c \in [0,1]$) was open in many cases: is it always the case that the maximizer or the minimizer has a winning strategy, i.e., one that enforces, against all strategies of the other player, that the objective is satisfied with probability $\ge c$ (resp. $< c$)? We show that almost-sure objectives (where $c=1$) are strongly determined. This vastly generalizes a previous result on finite games with almost-sure tail objectives. On the other hand we show that $\ge 1/2$ (co-)B\"uchi objectives are not strongly determined, not even if the game is finitely branching. Moreover, for almost-sure reachability and almost-sure B\"uchi objectives in finitely branching games, we strengthen strong determinacy by showing that one of the players must have a memoryless deterministic (MD) winning strategy.