English

Doubly Fair Parity Games

Computer Science and Game Theory 2026-05-12 v3

Abstract

We consider two-player games over finite graphs in which both players are restricted by fairness constraints on their moves. Given a two player game graph G=(V,E)G=(V,E) and a set of fair moves EfEE_f\subseteq E a player is said to play "fair" in GG if they choose an edge eEfe \in E_f infinitely often whenever the source vertex of ee is visited infinitely often. Otherwise, they play "unfair". We equip such games with two ω\omega-regular winning conditions α\alpha and β\beta deciding the winner of mutually fair and mutually unfair plays, respectively. Whenever one player plays fair and the other plays unfair, the fairly playing player wins the game. The resulting games are called "fair α/β\alpha/\beta games". We formalize fair α/β\alpha/\beta games and show that they are determined. For fair parity/parity games, i.e., fair α/β\alpha/\beta games where α\alpha and β\beta are given each by a parity condition over GG, we provide a polynomial reduction to (normal) parity games via a gadget construction inspired by the reduction of stochastic parity games to parity games. We further give a direct symbolic fixpoint algorithm to solve fair parity/parity games. On a conceptual level, we illustrate the translation between the gadget-based reduction and the direct symbolic algorithm which uncovers the underlying similarities of solution algorithms for fair and stochastic parity games, as well as for the recently considered class of fair games where only one player is restricted by fair moves.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.13612,
  title  = {Doubly Fair Parity Games},
  author = {Daniel Hausmann and Nir Piterman and Irmak Sağlam and Anne-Kathrin Schmuck},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.13612},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Journal version of the FoSSaCS 2024 paper "Fair $\omega$-Regular Games"

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:57:01.966Z