DKPRG or how to succeed in the Kolkata Paise Restaurant gamevia TSP

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel spatially-aware strategy for the Kolkata Paise Restaurant game, allowing agents multiple chances to choose restaurants and improving overall utilization by considering restaurant locations as uniformly distributed.

Contribution

It proposes a new approach that incorporates spatial distribution and multiple visit opportunities, enhancing restaurant utilization in the game.

Findings

Increased restaurant utilization through the new strategy.

Spatial distribution modeling improves decision-making.

Agents can revisit multiple restaurants within constraints.

Abstract

The Kolkata Paise Restaurant Problem is a challenging game, in which $n$ agents must decide where to have lunch during their lunch break. The game is very interesting because there are exactly $n$ restaurants and each restaurant can accommodate only one agent. If two or more agents happen to choose the same restaurant, only one gets served and the others have to return back to work hungry. In this paper we tackle this problem from an entirely new angle. We abolish certain implicit assumptions, which allows us to propose a novel strategy that results in greater utilization for the restaurants. We emphasize the spatially distributed nature of our approach, which, for the first time, perceives the locations of the restaurants as uniformly distributed in the entire city area. This critical change in perspective has profound ramifications in the topological layout of the restaurants, which now makes it completely realistic to assume that every agent has a second chance. Every agent now may visit, in case of failure, more than one restaurants, within the predefined time constraints.