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The value of a finite-state two-player zero-sum stochastic game with limit-average payoff can be approximated to within $\epsilon$ in time exponential in a polynomial in the size of the game times polynomial in logarithmic in…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2008-12-18 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Rupak Majumdar , Thomas A. Henzinger

Shortest-path games are two-player zero-sum games played on a graph equipped with integer weights. One player, that we call Min, wants to reach a target set of states while minimising the total weight, and the other one has an antagonistic…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-05-04 Benjamin Monmege , Julie Parreaux , Pierre-Alain Reynier

We consider zero-sum repeated games in which the players are restricted to strategies that require only a limited amount of randomness. Let $v_n$ be the max-min value of the $n$ stage game; previous works have characterized…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-02-12 Mehrdad Valizadeh , Amin Gohari

An average-time game is played on the infinite graph of configurations of a finite timed automaton. The two players, Min and Max, construct an infinite run of the automaton by taking turns to perform a timed transition. Player Min wants to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-01-16 Marcin Jurdzinski , Ashutosh Trivedi

We study the effectiveness of iterated elimination of strictly-dominated actions in random games. We show that dominance solvability of games is vanishingly small as the number of at least one player's actions grows. Furthermore,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-05-25 Noga Alon , Kirill Rudov , Leeat Yariv

Counter reachability games are played by two players on a graph with labelled edges. Each move consists in picking an edge from the current location and adding its label to a counter vector. The objective is to reach a given counter value…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-07-22 Julien Reichert

We study countably infinite stochastic 2-player games with reachability objectives. Our results provide a complete picture of the memory requirements of $\varepsilon$-optimal (resp. optimal) strategies. These results depend on the size of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Stefan Kiefer , Richard Mayr , Mahsa Shirmohammadi , Patrick Totzke

We consider a general class of round-robin tournament models of equally strong players. In these models, each of the $n$ players competes against every other player exactly once. For each match between two players, the outcome is a value…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-21 Yaakov Malinovsky

In this paper, we study the notion of admissibility for randomised strategies in concurrent games. Intuitively, an admissible strategy is one where the player plays `as well as possible', because there is no other strategy that dominates…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-02-22 Nicolas Basset , Gilles Geeraerts , Jean-François Raskin , Ocan Sankur

This paper analyzes a simple game with $n$ players. We fix a mean, $\mu$, in the interval $[0, 1]$ and let each player choose any random variable distributed on that interval with the given mean. The winner of the zero-sum game is the…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-04-24 Artem Hulko , Mark Whitmeyer

The central result of classical game theory states that every finite normal form game has a Nash equilibrium, provided that players are allowed to use randomized (mixed) strategies. However, in practice, humans are known to be bad at…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-07-07 Pavel Hubáček , Moni Naor , Jonathan Ullman

Classic reachability games on graphs are zero-sum games, where the goal of one player, Eve, is to visit a vertex from a given target set, and that of other player, Adam, is to prevent this. Generalised reachability games, studied by…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Sougata Bose , Daniel Hausmann , Soumyajit Paul , Sven Schewe , Tansholpan Zhanabekova

We consider 2-player games played on a finite state space for infinite rounds. The games are concurrent: in each round, the two players choose their moves simultaneously; the current state and the moves determine the successor. We consider…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-06-21 Krishnendu Chatterjee

We investigate zero-sum turn-based two-player stochastic games in which the objective of one player is to maximize the amount of rewards obtained during a play, while the other aims at minimizing it. We focus on games in which the minimizer…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Pablo F. Castro , Pedro R. D'Argenio , Luciano Putruele , Ramiro Demasi

Many problems in compositional synthesis and verification of multi-agent systems -- such as rational verification and assume-guarantee verification in probabilistic systems -- reduce to reasoning about two-player multi-objective stochastic…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Moritz Graf , Anthony Lin , Rupak Majumdar

We introduce and study pawn games, a class of two-player zero-sum turn-based graph games. A turn-based graph game proceeds by placing a token on an initial vertex, and whoever controls the vertex on which the token is located, chooses its…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Guy Avni , Pranav Ghorpade , Shibashis Guha

Weighted timed games are zero-sum games played by two players on a timed automaton equipped with weights, where one player wants to minimise the cumulative weight while reaching a target. Used in a reactive synthesis perspective, this…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Damien Busatto-Gaston , Benjamin Monmege , Pierre-Alain Reynier

Classical reactive synthesis approaches aim to synthesize a reactive system that always satisfies a given specifications. These approaches often reduce to playing a two-player zero-sum game where the goal is to synthesize a winning…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Karan Muvvala , Qi Heng Ho , Morteza Lahijanian

We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2021-12-15 R. Teal Witter

In this paper we revisit an open problem posed by Aldous on the max-entropy win-probability martingale: given two players of equal strength, such that the win-probability is a martingale diffusion, which of these processes has maximum…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-09-21 Gaoyue Guo , Sam D. Howison , Dylan Possamaï , Christoph Reisinger