English

Efficient Parallel Strategy Improvement for Parity Games

Data Structures and Algorithms 2017-05-08 v1 Formal Languages and Automata Theory Logic in Computer Science

Abstract

We study strategy improvement algorithms for solving parity games. While these algorithms are known to solve parity games using a very small number of iterations, experimental studies have found that a high step complexity causes them to perform poorly in practice. In this paper we seek to address this situation. Every iteration of the algorithm must compute a best response, and while the standard way of doing this uses the Bellman-Ford algorithm, we give experimental results that show that one-player strategy improvement significantly outperforms this technique in practice. We then study the best way to implement one-player strategy improvement, and we develop an efficient parallel algorithm for carrying out this task, by reducing the problem to computing prefix sums on a linked list. We report experimental results for these algorithms, and we find that a GPU implementation of this algorithm shows a significant speedup over single-core and multi-core CPU implementations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1705.02313,
  title  = {Efficient Parallel Strategy Improvement for Parity Games},
  author = {John Fearnley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.02313},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:38:29.788Z