Who Wins the Multi-Structural Game?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the computational complexity of multi-structural (MS) games, showing their decision problem is PSPACE-hard and in NEXPTIME, and addresses open questions about EF game complexity dependence on schema arity.

Contribution

It establishes complexity bounds for MS games, demonstrating PSPACE-hardness and NEXPTIME containment, and resolves an open problem regarding EF game complexity dependence.

Findings

MS games' decision problem is PSPACE-hard.

The problem is contained in NEXPTIME.

Resolved open question on EF game complexity dependence.

Abstract

Combinatorial games played between two players, called Spoiler and Duplicator, have often been used to capture syntactic properties of formal logical languages. For instance, the widely used Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"iss\'e (EF) game captures the syntactic measure of quantifier rank of first-order formulas. For every such game, there is an associated natural decision problem: "given an instance of the game, does Spoiler win the game on that instance?" For EF games, this problem was shown to be PSPACE-complete by Pezzoli in 1998. In this present paper, we show that the same problem for the *multi-structural* (MS) games of recent interest is PSPACE-hard, but contained in NEXPTIME. In the process, we also resolve an open problem posed by Pezzoli about the dependence of the hardness results for EF games on the arity of the schema under consideration. Our techniques combine adaptations of Pezzoli's constructions together with insights from the theory of inapproximability of optimization problems, as well as the recently developed technique of parallel play for MS games.